Franchising PPP advocacy: PPP units

While bilateral donors like DFID were funding PPFs to assist client governments with PPP transactions, other members of the development community were taking a more deliberative approach to PPP advocacy, like that endorsed by the World Bank. This approach involved encouraging governments to take ownership of the PPP development process by creating policies, laws, procedures, regulations, and implementation units to carry out their own facilitation of PPPs. The single most widely recommended measure of this kind was the establishment of single-purpose government agencies, known as “PPP units,” to provide a wide variety of services designed to result in successful PPP projects. Beginning in the late 2000s, dozens of developing countries were convinced to create such units, even though in most of these countries there was little prospect of active PPP programs, and few civil servants able to staff such units. What has been accomplished, however, is the creation of a vast, informal, multi-country coalition of civil servants incentivized to promote the use of infrastructure PPPs, but without the ability to assess the likely value of such projects or seriously consider alternatives. Case studies of PPP units in countries like South Africa, Zambia, and Nigeria illustrate the nature of this accomplishment.