Define the Public-Private Partnership through the Logic of Knowledge Management: A Literature Review

Public-Private Partnership (PPP) is merely considered as a tool of governance and management (Khanom, 2010). Nevertheless, for the last 40 years, many countries and regions have been promoting PPP to overcome the drawbacks of traditional public procurement to make this model of organization a popular tool widely used in the field of public services delivery (Cui et al, 2018). The World Bank (2007) defines PPP as "an agreement between a government and a private firm under which the private firm delivers an asset, a service, or both in return for payment [..]" and the main focus of PPPs is that added value can be achieved from greater co-operation between public and private actors (Steijn et al, 2011) precisely in correspondence of this agreement. This paper aims to investigate the contribution of Knowledge Management (KM) in facilitating a sustainable improvement in the delivery, efficiency, and effectiveness of PPP projects followed by a systematic literature review underling the relations between PPP and KM. Indeed, part of international literature emphasized the gap in skills related to public involvement for PPPs, also considering the lack of case studies that investigates PPP under a KM theoretical lens (Boyer, 2016; Robinson et al, 2010; Li et al, 2003). By this qualitative literature review, we tried to identify some best practices and common rules that admit the coexistence of PPP along with a Knowledge Management approach (Robinson et al, 2010). The results suggest an innovative concept of KM within PPPs, describing it as "process or practice of creating, acquiring, capturing, sharing and using knowledge [...], whether tacit or explicit, by making it easily accessible and usable to save time, improve performances and facilitate innovation in the planning and operational phases of PPP projects" (Scarbrough et al, 1999; Robinson et al, 2010). Furthermore, this work highlights how attention should be paid on the knowledge sources (Castrogiovanni et al, 2015) and on the increasing number of theoretical and comparative investigations on KM - both in private and public sectors- in order to develop PPP tools in line with current information needs and literature gaps (Carrillo et al, 2006).