The Private Financing of Public Infrastructure

Abstract

A valuable starting point for an overview of the private financing of public infrastructure is to adopt Hood’s (1994) distinction between ‘justifications’ and ‘explanations’. Justifications are those arguments mobilised in support of particular policies, whereas explanations are those — possibly overlapping — factors which can be identified as having been decisive in bringing about a particular policy change. The commentator often has to impose structure on a mass of documentation which rarely respects this distinction. Moreover, there might well be motivations (‘unmentionables’) which are deliberately left unspoken or understated. Dobek (1993) challenged the literature on UK privatisation which had claimed there was a lack of economic rationality behind certain aspects of the Conservative government’s programme, and stressed that some of these features could readily be understood in terms of building political support and eroding the support of other parties.