The Politics of Public–Private Partnerships and International Development (Routledge Explorations in Development Studies)

With the launch of Agenda 2030, public-private partnerships were heralded as an important means to realise the Sustainable Development Goals and to provide more sustainable development financing in the global south.

This book explores public-private partnerships from the bottom up, drawing on extensive empirical research in Ethiopia to illuminate the diversity of practices, arrangements and contradictions that the public-private partnership agenda enables, generates, and occludes. Despite the omnipresence of PPP talk among governments and international organisations, donor and recipient agencies, and private actors, there exists no universally agreed definition of PPP, and in practice it encompasses a remarkable diversity of activities and arrangements. This book zooms in on public-private partnerships in Ethiopia, considering what actors they bring together, what power dynamics they produce, how it alters them, what it says about state-society relations and how it infuses the individual Ps of PPPs with context specific meaning. By investigating how public-private partnerships play out in practice, the book sheds new light on how this ambiguous but proliferating discourse is changing the meanings, processes, and mechanisms of international development.

This book illuminates the unseen consequences of translating bold sustainable development goals strategies into practice, and will be of interest to researchers and practitioners of international development.

Jon Harald Sande Lie is a social anthropologist and research professor at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI) in Oslo, where he also heads the Research group for Peace, Conflict and Development. Through his research focus on the international development apparatus and its effects and articulations in Ethiopia, Uganda and the World Bank, he explores issues related to state formation, politics, power and resistance, and partnerships and public-private relations. He is the project manager and principal investigator of the ‘Public-private development interfaces in Ethiopia’-project, funded by the Research Council of Norway (grant no. 315356).

Paul Beaumont is a senior researcher at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI) and leads the ERC-funded research project Navigating the Era of Indicators (2025-2030) His research interests include the (dis)functioning of international institutions, dubious quantified performance indicators, and hierarchies in world politics. Paul has published two monographs: Performing Nuclear Weapons: How Britain Made its Bomb Make Sense (2021) and The Grammar of Status Competition: International Hierarchies and Domestic Politics (OUP, 2024).

Marit Tolo Østebø is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Florida. Her focal point of interest is anthropology of policy, international development and critical global health. Her work explores the relationship between the normative frameworks, policies, models, and stories that circulate within the policy world and the complex realities that exist “on the ground.” She integrates perspectives from multiple specialties including anthropology of policy, anthropology of religion, gender studies, digital anthropology, medical anthropology, and Science and Technology Studies (STS), and has focused on policy models and modeling communities, translations of gender equality, the interplay between religion and development, the relationship between politics and health research, and—more recently— global oncology and public-private partnerships (PPP). Her research is usually multi-sited and transnational in nature, with a primary geographical focus in Ethiopia, where she has conducted anthropological fieldwork since 2005.