Managing the evolutionary development of public-private partnerships

The purpose of this paper is to present the findings of a study examining the roles and behaviours of boundary spanning managers during the evolutionary stages of the development of public-private partnerships (PPPs). It responds to recent calls in the literature to pursue research that incorporates the pivotal contribution of individual actors in the collaborative process, and to set tills research within the stage specific context of partnerships as they typically proceed through various stages of development. Using a grounded methodology of data collection, coding and analysis within ten Australian and UK PPPs, the study demarcates a five-stage evolutionary development process of PPPs. Within each stage there exists a specific managerial focus in conjunction with one or two main managerial challenges. Boundary-spanning managers employ various strategies to overcome such challenges within each specific stage thus ensuring the progressive evolution of the PPP from one stage to the next, eventually culminating in the successful closure of the project.