About the Roundtable

Cities all over the world are growing in size and complexity. As a result, governing a city and ensuring that a variety of services are provided to its residents is proving to be a challenge. In response, cities have resorted to developing partnerships with a variety of actors from the private and non-profit sectors to deliver services such as water supply, waste management, homeless shelters and so on. How has this experience been and what have cities learnt from it? This webinar draws upon partnerships that cities have undertaken globally to help answer this question.

In the first session, we investigate traditional public-private partnerships in the urban sector where a private provider contractually partners with a municipal authority to deliver a service. While such PPPs are prevalent across many sectors, they have not been researched as extensively in the urban context. In the second session we investigate other forms of partnerships, often non-contractual, where cities enter into relationships with players such as NGOs to deliver a variety of 'invisible' services - providing food to migrants affected by Covid-19 for instance. We intend to compare and contrast these approaches to understand their relative benefits and challenges.

Taken together the webinar intends to advance our understanding of how cities can leverage partnerships to better function in an increasingly complex environment.