PPPs and SDGs, the Missing Stakeholder Is Civil Society

Raymond Saner, (2021) « PPPs and SDGs, the Missing Stakeholder Is Civil Society”

In A. Farazmand (ed.), Global Encyclopedia of Public Administration, Public Policy, and Governance, pp 1-10, Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021; https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31816-5_4320-1

The SDGs suggest the achievement of sustain able economic, social, and environmental goals (triple bottom line) for each member country of the United Nations. To implement the SDGs, each government is supposed to set its triple bottom line goals, communicate them to their citizens, make the goal setting inclusive and participatory, and provide for means to review and monitor the implementation of the SDGs from 2015 to 2030. The UNECE PPP standard setting process is too crucial for the future of our societies to be left to private sector providers (construction companies, financial brokers) and government offices often short of democratic legitimacy. Without the inclusion of the civil society actors like consumer groups, cooperatives, labor unions, academic scholars, and teaching faculty, the risk of misguided investment decisions and related rent- seeking behavior by private and public sector actors is too high to be left to experts alone, however competent they might be. What is needed is a PPP Observatory which could add information on PPPs that are often missing or not fully reliable. Such a PPP Observatory could support UNECE and other international organizations but also governments and civil society stake holders involved in PPPs. A PPP Observatory could help the PPP-SDG process stay on course and ensure that the implementation of PPPs is aligned with SDG principles such as inclusiveness, participation, and transparency.