Partnerships represent the second generation of efforts to bring competitive market discipline to bear on government operations. Unlike the first generation of privatizing efforts, partnering involves sharing both responsibility and financial risk. In the best situations, the strengths of each sector maximize overall performance. In these cases, partnering institutionalizes collaborative arrangements in which the differences between the sectors become blurred.

This is the first book to evaluate public-private partnerships in a broad range of policy areas. The chapters focus on education, health care and health policy, welfare, prisons, the criminal justice system, environmental policy, energy policy, technology research arid development, and transportation. The contributors come from a number of fields, including political science, education, law, economics, and public health. They merge experiential and social-scientific findings to examine how partnerships perform, to identify the conditions in which they work best, and to determine when they might be expected to fail.