Public-private partnerships are usually sold as a financing innovation: a way to fund public infrastructure with private capital. That framing is where most of them start to fail, because a PPP is not primarily a financing structure. It is a risk-allocation structure, and the financing is a consequence of getting the risk allocation right. Treat it as the former and you get a deal that closes and a project that does not deliver.
Why PPPs fail on delivery, not finance
The autopsy on a failed PPP rarely finds a financing problem. It finds a delivery problem: risk allocated to the party least able to bear it, demand assumptions that did not survive contact with reality, an availability structure that paid the private partner regardless of performance, or a public institution that lacked the capacity to manage the contract it had signed.
These are not financing failures. They are design and delivery failures, baked in at structuring and discovered years later when the project underperforms and the dispute begins. The financing worked exactly as written. The structure was wrong.
Designing for delivery
A PPP that delivers is designed backwards from the outcome. Risk sits with the party best able to manage it: construction risk with the builder, demand risk with whoever can actually influence demand, regulatory risk with the public side that controls the rules. Payment is tied to performance, so the private partner earns by delivering, not by being present. And the public institution is given, or built, the capacity to manage the contract over its full life, because a contract no one can administer is a contract that fails.
This requires legal and commercial structuring together. The lawyers cannot allocate risk they do not understand commercially, and the commercial team cannot price risk the legal structure does not enforce. The two have to be done as one piece of work, by people who can hold both.
Delivery is the product
The failure mode in most reform and infrastructure programmes is not the policy or the financing. It is the delivery layer, the part that turns a signed structure into a working outcome, and the part that is consistently underfunded and undervalued.
Closing that gap is the work: structuring the partnership so it is bankable and enforceable, standing up the delivery capacity to manage it, and treating delivery as the product rather than the afterthought. Public goals become real when someone builds the layer that delivers them. That layer is the opportunity.