Stability Pact Gives High Priority to Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) at UNECE Session

The private sector, in partnership with the public sector, needs to play a bigger role in the rehabilitation and modernisation of infrastructure for the economic recovery of Southeast Europe. Resources from both governments and the international donor community will not be sufficient to meet the massive needs in almost all the countries of the region in areas such as transport, energy and water and waste disposal as well as in education, health and housing.

This was the topic of a special session on "Public-Private Partnerships: Facing the Challenges", that took place in Bucharest on 24 October. The Special Session was organized by the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE), the Stability Pact and the Foreign Ministry of Romania on the occasion of the Second Regional Conference of the Stability Pact for South East Europe. The participants included representatives of government, private sector and banks including the EBRD.

Opening the session Mr Bodo Hombach, Special Coordinator, declared that the Stability Pact was moving into a very important phase with commitments of new resources. "These," he said, "would help in leveraging new resources from the private sector."

Mr Paolo Garonna, Deputy Executive Secretary of the UNECE, declared that "private sector resources, capacities and skills need to become the bedrock of infrastructure reconstruction in the region. In South East Europe, given the resource requirements, PPPs are not a policy option, but a strategic necessity."

Despite the necessity the number of operational PPPs is very small. One of the main bottlenecks that needs to be overcome is the lack of Government capacity at national and local levels, to identify viable projects and bring them forward into the market place. "While training programmes for civil servants on PPPs were taking place in western Europe not a single programme had been undertaken in the south east European region", said Mr Geoffrey Hamilton, Regional Adviser of the UNECE. The challenge is to improve the skills of public administration to negotiate and manage successful PPP projects.

Mr. Eamonn Kearns, Head of the Irish PPP Unit, said that the Irish experience showed how important it was to establish dedicated PPP Units or Task forces that covered all relevant ministries and which could pool skills and mobilize the public administrations behind PPPs, giving a central direction and high-level political support.

The day after the special session, the UNECE delivered a report of the event to the Second Regional Conference for the Stability Pact where numerous delegations of different European countries were present. Considering the extremely positive support received at this Conference and in order to build the government capacity to identify and promote concrete PPP projects, it was proposed to hold a PPP Forum under the auspices of the Stability Pact next year in Romania.

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Ref: ECE/OPA/01/11