Prepare and submit a term paper on The Politics of Public Private Partnerships by Flinders.

You will prepare and submit a term paper on The Politics of Public Private Partnerships by Flinders. Your paper should be a minimum of 2000 words in length. The works at hand present the argument of Matthew Flinders regarding the politics of PPPs. The validity of his argument regarding the associated costs of PPPs is the essential point presented in this paper. Flinders’ major argument The article “The Politics of Public-Private Partnerships” is a particular argument that presents PPPs as potential factors that provide the opportunity for political issues and tensions to proliferate in the government (Flinders, 2005). According to Flinders, political issues and tensions are largely been overlooked, which may be eventually observed from the point of view of efficiency, risk, complexity, accountability and governance and the future of state projects. Through PPP, efficiency gains and service improvements in some policy areas may be observed, but based on the thoughts of Flinders these also have corresponding political and democratic costs. In other words, PPPs may have provided significant benefits at some point, but on the other hand, these can only be generated with substantial political and democratic costs. For Flinders, short-term benefits linked to PPPs may be outweighed by the long-term problems. Therefore, it emphasizes more of the probable threats or risks. Thus, Flinders adopted the definition of PPP as a risk-sharing relationship existing between the public and private sectors just to result in the desired public policy outcome. In order to explicate this point, Flinders was able to subdivide his arguments into various sections. The first section deals with the Labour government’s approach to public sector reform since May 1, 1997. In the second section, the author examines Public Interest Companies (PICs) prior to a more detailed analysis of the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) in the UK. The third section introduces the framework to elaborate on the idea of the political issues and debates around PPPs. Then finally, the last section provides information concerning the reasons why the government may commit to PPPs. Central to the idea concerning the first section is the prevailing diverse models of service delivery that the public and private sectors implemented. This at some point, according to Flinders provided the opportunity to the birth of political-administrative perspective. The second section tries to enhance the idea of ‘back-door privatization’ which may have potentially evolved from PICs down to PFI. In this case, various political concerns surfaced and the issue was far from monetary consideration. The third section introduces some relevant themes surrounding PPPs in the UK. Based on the argument of Flinders, these themes may have substantially provided an opportunity for the public sectors to be served, but the bottom line of these themes may provide implication for the advantage only of the few and not the majority. The fourth section is a significant confirmation of the elemental drawbacks linked to controversial PFI deals. However, the government seems to have no other choice but to continuously rely on the private sectors in the future to provide public services resulting in partnerships with associated political challenges. It is now important to consider some remarkable insights regarding the stand of Flinders on PPPs. Key insights In this section, the work at hand presents the key insights into the relationship between government and business based on the relevant points from the article.