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Cities and Partnerships

Public-Private Partnerships have been used as a mode to deliver essential services across countries and contexts for several years now. However, most of the discussions on PPPs feature large projects and endeavors – road networks, airports, healthcare systems and so on. While PPPs have played a role in urban service delivery (in water and sanitation for instance as also in waste management), question marks are raised with regards to their feasibility and economic viability in the urban context, given that project sizes are much smaller, revenue opportunities are fewer and the need to manage stakeholders is perhaps larger. Despite this, cities have featured extremely innovative forms of service delivery. City governments have acted in partnership with not only the private sector (as in the case of solid waste management in India) but also with the ‘social’ or ‘citizen’ sector. One example was during the recent Covid-19 pandemic where citizen groups in participation with the Corporation of Chennai carried out a sustained program of taking care of the needs of displaced migrant laborers. 
This roundtable discussion will attempt to bring together examples from around the world to understand the possibilities of Public-Private or Public-Private-People partnerships in cities, challenges, best practices, and how a more institutionalized version of these arrangements could change the ways in which cities function.