Ghana’s Public-Private Partnership: Standards and Waves of Elitism

Abstract

Purpose

The study deployed political economy perspectives to analyse Ghana’s Public-Private Partnership (PPP) regime to ascertain whether or not the nature and financial considerations in the PPP contract met internationally acceptable PPP standards as well as identifying traces of elitism and exploitation.

Design

Guided by theoretical arguments on elitism drawn from the works of Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, Georg Lukacs, Andre Gunder Frank and Samir Amin as well as Bastin’s PPP conceptual framework, the study employed interviews and documentary evidence using three outsourcing contracts as case studies.

Findings

The study discovered many inconsistencies between the nature of contracts in Ghana’s PPP and internationally acceptable PPP standards. Moreover, PPP arrangements rather represent one of the avenues for seeming and apparent connivance between political and economic elites resulting in some financial gains for the elites at the expense of the state and sections of the citizenry.

Originality

The paper concluded that PPP is not immune to elitism. Ghana’s PPP presents academics in political economy an analytical tool which suggests that exploitation of citizens in developing countries is neither exhibited by external political and economic elites nor by external and internal political elites alone; but equally exhibited a class of indigenous political and economic actors found in those same developing countries.

Keywords: Public-Private Partnership (PPP), Elitism, Political Economy, Outsourcing

Article Classification: Conceptual Paper