UN/ ECE - Guidelines on Governance in Public-Private Partnerships for Infrastructure Development (2005)

Improving governance can help maximize the benefits and minimize the risks in Public Private Partnerships. It requires governments to acquire new skills in public management and to establish new institutions and procedures. Governments will need to focus on supervision and regulation, rather than on direct ownership and controls. In addition to these new skills, new sources of expertise and qualifications are required to ensure that PPPs also contribute to sustainable development. Once applied, these skills increase the transparency and accountability of infrastructure projects and add significantly to the contribution which the project makes to sustainable development. Acquiring these new public management skills, however, is not easy.

One technique to assist governments and the private sector to acquire this new expertise is through benchmarking best practices in specific projects. Benchmarking of the procedures and practices involved in delivering PPP projects can highlight what needs to be done to meet the new public management standards. It allows the key stakeholders in PPPs, i.e., the government, the private sector, the employees and NGOs, to measure their performance in improving governance in PPPs. It can increase the attractiveness of countries to foreign investors as well as ensuring that the projects will be successful. Currently, there are few, if any, mechanisms for benchmarking the achievement of governance in PPP projects.