– The Asian Example
OVER THE past three years of the existence of this column, I have touched on a number of different issues.  For me, it is a happy coincidence the times when — more or less immediately after (sometimes longer) — having written upon a particular issue from a particular perspective, that issue, from that very perspective, finds its way into a larger public discussion.
One issue that I’ve touched tangentially upon in the past, and one that has made the news, somewhat controversially, in the past few weeks, is that of public-private partnerships.  This first article is intended not to weigh in on any particular issue, but to focus on the larger picture, since what I’ve noticed is that there seems to be some gaps in the knowledge of several commentators on how public-private partnerships are supposed to work.
Before I proceed, I would like to state that my opinions in this article do not represent my official capacity as the Executive Director of the Health Sector Development Unit, nor, indeed, any other public position I hold.
That established, we need to arrive at some sort of workable definition of what exactly a public- private partnership is.  For the purpose of this discussion, I will use the definition as given in a 2006 EU Briefing Note on public-private partnerships:
“A public-private partnership (PPP) is a contractual agreement between the public and the private sectors, whereby the private operator commits to provide public services that have traditionally been supplied or financed by public institutions. The ultimate goal of PPPs is to obtain more ‘value for money’ than traditional public procurement options would deliver.”
‘P3s have been arguably touted – within the various models – as an effective means of facilitating delivery of public services without the inefficiencies often associated with, or inherent in, public service mechanisms.
We do, in fact, have such arrangements in place in Guyana.  To give as an example of a working public-private partnership — which is a bit close to one aspect of my professional life — is the way the City collects garbage.
The City Council has a mandate to remove waste from city properties, a service it has contracted out to several private companies. Notwithstanding the example given relative to the cost factor, P3 can also be done as part of the social responsibility of an agency (even on a short-term basis).
Looking at the research I’ve done over the past week or so on the issue of P3, what I’ve discovered is that Asian countries in particular seem to have gone the furthest in the developing world in instituting workable P3 programmes, although – as we might expect – it is the developed world, the United Kingdom (UK) being the foremost example, which has made public-private partnerships into a high science.
As I mentioned earlier in this article, it is not that Guyana does not have operational P3s in place.  What I am unaware of, however  — and I might be wrong in this regard — is the existence of the sort of overarching policy framework in other jurisdictions to develop and govern such arrangements.
There has been some recent focus to put this in place at a regional level. Last month, at the opening of CARICOM’s 19th Council on Human and Social Development (COHSOD) meeting right here in Guyana, Secretary-General Edwin Carrington directly linked the creation of a ‘P3’ policy framework to sustainable development in the region:
“Policy coherence in human and social development no doubt makes it imperative for labour to be mainstreamed into the social and economic strategies of the region. Among other things, this… means establishing a vision of the parameters of growth and development that are directly linked to the human resource requirements as a main prerequisite of development. But these cannot be achieved without a concerted effort to harness sustainable public-private partnerships, strengthen institutional capabilities and create the enabling environment for human resource development.”
The perennial problem with regional initiatives such as this is that they often do not go beyond the specific donor-funded conference.   True, this typical failure to launch often has an associated element of lack of funding; developing economies often do not have the capital to invest in the sort of trial-and-error conceptual development process that results in working practical programmes.  That said, innovation often costs less than people make out.
And in this case, the groundwork has largely been done already, with supporting information easily available, as it should be, in this the age of the Internet. The Seoul Declaration on P3s in Asia was actually built upon extensive work undertaken by the United Nations, and enshrined in several declarations and other policy documents, beginning with the Millennium Declaration of September 2000.
In short, the resources to at least begin the establishment of a P3 policy framework, as touted by CARICOM’s Secretary-General, are already well within the public domain and accessible by UN members.  There is no need, therefore, to reinvent the wheel in terms of the fundamentals of establishing P3s policy, particularly from a regional perspective.
But what of the benefits of P3 arrangements?  How does the average P3 impact upon everyday life for the ordinary person? Granted the tendency globally has been primarily towards large infrastructural projects, there have been examples of P3 projects across the gamut of public services.   I cited the Mayor & City Council (M&CC)’s garbage collection arrangement earlier, which falls under municipal services.  But there is also the area of health services, for example.  The Caribbean Heart Institute is an excellent example of how a public partnership in health can work, marrying sustainability with affordability in the delivery of a crucial healthcare service.
Further, cheap healthcare is an industry in itself, as the experience of countries like Israel, Brazil, and Canada could attest to, with their health services programme run largely by private capital operating within a comprehensive policy framework as set out by government.
It takes just a little imagination and resourcefulness therefore, in my view, to expand the range of health services that come under private-public partnerships locally, and, who knows! Eventually Guyana can count itself among the dozens of countries which offer health tourism services.  To wit, this line of reasoning can absolutely extend itself, to other areas of our social and economic development. In what one can presume to be the absence of a document policy, however, a crucial first step would be for the government and the private sector to proactively engage each other in coming up with a proper, codified public-private partnership policy.