Community involvement in the implementation of the national policy on public-private partnership: a study of infrastructural development in Lagos State, Nigeria.

Abstract

Undoubtedly, public-private partnership (PPP) has emerged as a policy tool for infrastructural financing, optimisation and maintenance through an appropriate policy framework. The policy framework of PPP is expected to promote collaborative governance through democratic values in the partnership agenda. These ideals have positively impacted on design and implementation of PPP policy in the developed nations. Ironically, a series of resentments, public outbursts, complaints and agitation that followed the implementation of the National Policy on PPP in Nigeria heightened the need for this study. These unwholesome developments usually arise from the host communities over claims to certain rights or due to their exclusion in certain critical decisions connected to the PPP projects implementation agenda. Using Lagos State, Nigeria as a case study, the researcher draws substantially from the themes of collaborative governance theories among others to examine how the National Policy on PPP in Nigeria aligns with the state’s policy to accommodate the host communities in the infrastructural policy implementation framework (PPP-IPIF). The multi-theoretical approach adopted is premised on the researchers’ pragmatic philosophical orientation to evaluate theories or beliefs in line with practical applications. Hence, data were sourced, presented and analysed using different statistical tools. Conclusions were drawn based on the combined strength of both qualitative and qualitative data using a triangulation/nested method. The major finding of the study suggests that the existing PPP implementation framework has not effectively incorporated the host communities by creating an institutionalised function for them. Therefore, their involvement or non-involvement in project implementation was left to the discretions of private project handlers. The study also established that, beyond compensation, the host communities desired to take an active part in the PPP policy implementation framework. Before this study, our knowledge of PPP infrastructural project governance was sketchy. It is against this background that this study employs the theoretical viewpoints of collaborative governance and participation theories, to advance the knowledge of host community stakeholding in PPP implementation. The study analyses the framework upon which the projects were established and the extent to which participatory values were institutionalised in the collaborative arrangement. The study concluded that PPP is a collaborative governance model whose implementation is still at the experimental stage in Nigeria; the researcher, therefore, develops a workable model as part of the recommendation based on the study’s experiential findings.