Abstract
In line with the Central Government’s proposal to improve its governing capacity, Public-Private Partnership (PPP) has been foregrounded in China as an innovative tool to coordinate the state, enterprises and citizens together, allowing different actors to pursue benefits respectively and at the same time collectively. In this paper, I draw on data collected from China Public Private Partnership Center to illustrate the nature and mechanisms of PPP as a governing mode. Moving beyond earlier studies that focus only on financial or legal aspects of PPP, here I analyze the spatial-temporal pattern of PPP projects to show how and how far PPP has been rendered a critical governing tool in China. Deploying such methods as Standard Deviational Ellipse (SDE), Spatial Optimized Hot Spot Analysis, and Multiple Linear Regression, I find that provinces in central China [put their names here] initiated the most PPP projects, even more than provinces in the coastal area, while different provinces are adopting this tool for distinct reasons. Specifically, local governments in the central area intends to use PPP to make the ends meet with regard to local fiscal deficit, and their coastal counterpart focuses more on the investment into public infrastructure. Temporally, the use of PPP emerged in 2012 and reached the top in 2016, before it experienced a quick shrink in 2017. This change invites us to explore how different stakeholders are negotiating with each other and why their behavior pattern changed dramatically. With central and local official documents, as well as newspaper reports, I demonstrate that this change is closely associated with the nature of PPP as a financial mechanism for spatial governance, which rises and falls together with the state’s demands of balancing financial capacity and accountability at the local level. This article seeks to shed lights on understanding and the social governance mechanism of PPP mode from spatial perspective innovatively in order to provide theoratical support for the management and implementation of PPP in the future.
