Advancing Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) Through Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs)

Introduction

For years, Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) have been shown to be the main tool used for overcoming the development obstacles in providing vital infrastructure and services due to the strengths that public and private sectors offer (UN, 2016). This chapter insists on devising anti-poverty strategies primarily through partnerships for sustainable development, meaning PPPs that are often effective and cover any theme or area they may apply to. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development adopted by all UN member states gave access to PPPs. Because of the holistic nature of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), it required many partners to engage in the fight against poverty and other socioeconomic challenges. The role of PPPs has proven to be very high in achieving SDGs.

In 2015, the UN laid the foundation for robust relationships between governments or public and private sectors and reached for voluntarism and cooperation in the achievement of collaborative and joint efforts that will be oriented toward sustainable development. Those international trends and innovations in PPPs are continually changing and adopting them employing SDGs support according to a UN Office for Partnerships 2021 report (UN Office for Partnerships, 2021).

In addition, studying the best-practice models of PPPs offers invaluable insights into current trends and effective strategies that they employ to move up the SDGs faster, offering relevant guidance for maximizing the role of PPPs to promote the SDGs agenda. For example, the Asian Development Bank illustrates that knowledge transfers from successful projects have influential role in terms of learning from case studies and benchmarking, pushing for the implementation of similar approaches in the future (ADB, 2020). These insights are clear demonstrations of the robustness of institutional structures, the clarity in the regulatory framework and the dedication of politicians in the execution of PPP projects (UN DESA, 2023).

The Sustainable Development Goals pose a significant turning point in the world’s collective actions towards the realization of a fairer, productive, and, of course, sustainable world (Steiner, 2018; Vargas et al., 2021). What needs to be highlighted is that when it comes to resolving global issues like poverty, inequalities, and climate change, PPPs would be a strategic tool of gathering resources, expertise, and technology, to successfully attain development goals.

In this chapter, the contributions of PPPs to SDGs fulfillment are analyzed by secondary literature study and real case examples. The PPPs mean complexity and hazards, which moreover intensify the need ever more of transparency, accountability, and equity for the whole processes of the PPPs to become cooperative despite being very promising (IMF, 2020).

This study is conducted using a holistic approach to advance PPPs in which sustainability input is increased. The main objective of the study is to evaluate the effect of PPPs on different sectors and the context, learn the important factors for the successes and failures of these partnerships, and offer a workable solution to the stakeholders, practitioners and policymakers. In doing so, we shall build a platform of dialog, knowledge-sharing and a collective learning process which will tremendously accelerate the pace at which the world will achieve significant equality, sustainability, and prosperity. Some objectives of this research include the following.