Essay Example on Public-Private Partnerships: Financing and Delivering Projects for Public Benefit

Introduction

Public-Private Partnerships (PPP) involves contract-like conformity between one or more private agencies and one or more public or government agencies. The central purpose of this partnership is to support the offering of public services, including designing, financing, operating, and building projects for the public benefit (Roman & San Bernardino, 2015). In this agreement, the private sector accepts to take risks by partially financing a project, and upon completing the project, the public sector refunds all the funds quoted for the project. However, the agreement has to be permitted by constitutional laws and policies before the project is signed and accepted. These regulations are meant to address the process of reviewing, developing, and procuring PPP projects. Notably, the laws governing the project should be consistent with the host state's existing rules (World Bank, 2020a). Some of the statutes enacted include the contractual penalties, which commits the operator to pay a given penalty in instances of default and breaching of the contract.

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Background

The advent of the internet and technology has led to the transgression and manipulation of both PPPs and Cyber threats. As such, threats in cyberspace are continually endangering data, even the ones of secure settings. These threats affect not only the public but also the private sectors. Besides, even if these threats are noticed or masked, they still pose a danger to the organization's assets and information. Therefore, PPPs can collectively contrivance and collaborate on methods to prevent, monitor, and control cyber threats (World Bank, 2020b). Since nations hold its residents massive and crucial information, attack on the nation's security infrastructure damage citizen's lives, operations, and services. Therefore, both the government and private sectors need to form a protected working environment that will protect them from cybercriminals.

Additionally, the two sectors need to address cyber-related threats by incorporating information distribution and sharing, the initiation of threat intelligence, and the development of cyber risk profiles. On information sharing, a well networked, adaptive, and flexible framework should be developed to share cyber threat-related information that relies on data-sharing centers (World Bank, 2020b). The information-sharing centers will be tasked to control standards, operating procedures, and set baseline capabilities to ensure an end to end flow of information across all critical infrastructure partners (Homeland Security, 2020). By making the framework flexible will enable the PPPs to have an effective response to a developing threat while bearing various restrictions and safeguards on data sharing.

According to Homeland Security (2020), the information-sharing framework was built on the laws identified in the US state's national security plans and strategies. This approach was meant to recognize the federal system, free market, and the country's size at large. Combined with the multi-faceted and the developing nature of threats that confront the US, the framework was to control a whole community and the government to monitor, prevent, and mitigate the risks. As such, the federal government partnered with the non-governmental sectors and the residents to guard, prevent, respond, and recover from threats. Hence, the effectiveness of this approach relies heavily on proper information sharing across all partners. Equally, this framework emphasizes that only those entitled with a direct link should receive and share information. As such, it nullifies unauthorized accesses completely.

Next, the development of threat intelligence will also be an effective way of mitigating cyber threats. Cyber threat intelligence (CTI) involves collecting, evaluating, and analyzing the threat information through structured and rigorous techniques by the expertise personnel who can access all sources of information. Just like other intelligence, cyber risks intelligence offers additional value to the information related to cyber threats. The added value aid and reduce consumer uncertainties by identifying opportunities and threats. Equally, the cyber intelligence development is an end to end process, commonly referred to as the intelligence cycle. In its circular process, the collection of data is planned, evaluated, and implemented. Then the outcomes are examined to produce intelligence (World Bank, 2020b). Finally, the consequential intelligence is circulated and re-evaluated into the perspective of consumer feedback and new information. Notably, the analysis part of the cycle is what makes the intelligence unique from other forms of data gathering and distribution. Thus, CTI is beneficial to all levels of state and private entities. As such, proper usage of cyber threat intelligence provides superior insight to cyber risks, hence allowing easy and faster responses in mitigating the threats (World Bank, 2020b). Equally, CTI enables decision-makers in finding out acceptable business threats and develop controls for cyber threats.

Benefits of Participating in PPPs

Of recent, the importance of PPPs made them find renewed applications in both developing and developed nations. The constraints to government resources and the fiscal space made states to shift to the non-public sector as a breakthrough for a surplus source of financing to seal the funding gap. As such, through the incorporation of private sectors in fundings, state projects have been completed through signing long-term payment agreements (World Bank, 2020b). Thus, the PPPs have led to an increased rate of completing projects. Equally, the PPPs have boosted economic growth since the government funds are reinvested in other industrial projects while private sectors fund the initial project.

However, the PPPs expose considerable drawbacks as well. The public-private partnership extends project risks to the private. And in the long-run, the private party will seek compensation for the risks, hence leading to increased government costs (World Bank, 2020b). Equally, some tasks may be socially and politically challenging to initiate and execute as compared to others. This instance occurs when the project involves resettlement or land issues. Also, at some point, some private sectors lacked trust in investing in the government.

Recommendations and Summary

In scrutinizing the current PPPs in other areas other than cybersecurity, some limitations are realized which require immediate mitigation measures. Notably, the private agencies outlined a lack of trust as significant limitations in working the public or government sectors. Therefore, an efficient PPP is required to establish a recommendable level of transparency and trust. For example, some PPPs in Holland solved this limitation by developing a secure information network in which the government lacked direct access without the permission of the other companies involved in the partnership. Besides, a joint cybersecurity panel representing both private and public sectors should be developed to enhance trust and boost cooperation between the two. On fighting cybercrimes, uniform laws for mitigating cybercrimes and additional instantaneous information-sharing systems should be established. Also, state law enforcement organizations should be encouraged to slot in the PPPs' cybersecurity to enhance harmonization between the private and public agencies.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the mutual trust between the two sectors remains a crucial aspect of national cybersecurity policy. Hence, PPPs' cybersecurity should be based on the establishment of mutual trust, cooperation as well as transparent dialogue between the government and the non-governmental agencies. Equally, by illuminating the regulatory framework in cybersecurity, the public sector will lessen the hesitations of the private agencies to reach to the government in case of a cyber attack. Hence, the proper solution to these issues, PPPs' cybersecurity can work to initiate policies for managing risks and sharing information. As such, both public and the private segment will be equipped highly to deal with cyber threats in the future.

References

Homeland Security. (2020). Critical Infrastructure Threat Information Sharing Framework. https://www.tml.org/DocumentCenter/View/73/Critical-Infrastructure-Threat-Information-Sharing-Framework-PDF

Roman, A. V., & San Bernardino, C. A. (2015). A Guide to Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs): What Public Procurement Specialists Need To Know. Research Report.

World Bank. (2020a). Government Objectives: Benefits and Risks of PPPs. Public-private partnership. https://ppp.worldbank.org/public-private-partnership/overview/ppp-objectives

World Bank. (2020b). Public-Private Partnerships Laws: Concession Laws. Public-private partnership. https://ppp.worldbank.org/public-private-partnership/legislation-regulation/laws/ppp-and-concession-laws