The Importance of People First Public Private Partnerships : An Interview with PPP Global Expert David Baxter
GBPG Group Chairman Malcolm De Silva interviews Global PPP Expert David Baxter on why People First PPPs are the future, how they tie in with Environmental, Social, and Governance objectives and how Procurement and Procurement Staff can make all the difference to their success. Malcolm uses his 25-plus years of experience in legal, contracting and procurement as a staff member within EU, UN and International Development Finance Institutions, to extract David’s key perspective insights and wide-ranging experiences in this vibrant exchange on cornerstone subjects. GBPG: Global Best Practice Group is delighted to welcome Mr. David Baxter. David is a titan of public private partnerships (PPPs) and a global influencer on People First PPPs, so we are so honoured to have him on our inaugural GBPG interview. Just to set the scene further, David has an illustrious career. Not only has he worked for Tetra Tech, DAI and Booz Allen he is also now the Senior Vice President of the International Resilience Center in Arlington and New Orleans. So, in today’s interview, we are going to discuss the essentials of PPP’s, David’s experience in PPPs, and not only that, the latest trends within PPP’s. David, how are you? David Baxter: Fine, thank you. Good morning or good afternoon for Europe. GBPG: David, are you sitting in South Africa at the moment or in America? David Baxter: I’m in Washington DC at the moment. GBPG: I guess as you hail from South Africa, I’d like to ask you about your initial working career. Was that in South Africa and did that involve PPPs? David Baxter: So, my initial working career in South Africa started, and this gives you an indication maybe how old and ancient I am, in the beginning of the 1990s when Apartheid was at the height of its chaos. It was a very interesting world that I was working in. Coming from the privileged white class in South Africa, I had grown up with a big strong social conscience, and I decided at that time to go and teach at a historically black university in South Africa, one of the segregated universities, which was the University of the North, which is now called the University of Limpopo. I taught Development Economics there and I got involved in my first, initiatory, if you can call it that, interactions on things that were leading towards PPP’s. While I was there, I became an advisor to the World Health Organization’s “Global Social Change Transformation Initiative “ and started working with rural communities and looking at what they needed when it came to social infrastructure and just typical hardcore infrastructure, water, electricity and that in rural areas. I then moved on to the Human Sciences Research Council, which was and is still the premier research institution in South Africa. It is the equivalent of the American National Sciences Foundation. There I led a program called the Human Needs, Resources and Environment where I worked very closely on issues pertaining to people and getting people involved as stakeholders in infrastructure development. So, it was sort of the beginning steps to what is now known as, Public Private Partnerships, bringing the public and the private sector together. Two years later I moved to the United States, where I got more involved with typical concessionary type work as a consultant at Booz Allen, as a consultant to the Department of the Interior. I then consulted with the Millennium Challenge Cooperation in eight countries to help them develop infrastructure projects. So, every step led me to becoming more and more involved with Public Private Partnerships, until I headed up the Institute for Public Private Partnerships in Washington DC. GBPG: You mentioned people, David, and I think you are very much a “people centric person”. Could you explain what People First PPPs are and then go on to talk about ESG? David Baxter: Sure. So traditionally Public Private Partnerships have evolved over the years. When they started in the 80s in the UK, they were essentially an alternative procurement platform, another way to procure contracts for public works and services and working closely with the private sector. Mainly it was driven by the fact that under the Thatcher government there was a massive infrastructure funding gap and so the government was looking for alternative ways to bring private finance into projects. This innovative approach spread all over the world because governments thought, you know, wait, this is something that’s good. And so over time, through the good and the bad, because they were good PPP projects and there were also very bad PPP projects, PPP’s have constantly evolved pretty much to this day, where we understand them to be partnerships between the public and private sector through a contract to provide a service or to build a public works and where risk is shared appropriately, hopefully, between appropriate parties. It has a performance period, usually 20 to 30 years, and it has a financial proposition in a concession idea of some sorts behind it. But people then started realizing recently, and I would say this is like in the last maybe five years that here we are doing PPPs in the traditional way, but it’s just really focused on the contractual mechanism. It is now thought that we should leverage PPPs and the sense of moving them more towards serving the purpose of helping countries achieve their development goals and also to help them achieve their Sustainable Development Goals, their SDG’s. So, what happened was that you had a situation where people started thinking: When we are doing PPP’s, we should be doing it because of people, we shouldn’t just be looking at value for money in the project, which was a typical sort of constraint to determine where the projects were bankable, but we should also look at value for people. So that’s a new concept that’s been interesting. Also, value for the future. In essence, future proofing projects so you know, introducing elements of sustainability and
