A feminist critique of PPPs rooted in the global South

Abstract

In the current phase of concentration and financialisation of global capital, private corporations have increasingly gained a position of power over other actors. In many regions of the global North and South, they are able to impose their own agendas, driven by the constant search for ever-greater profits. Private actors have increasingly come to subordinate public and collective interests, diminishing the capacity of the state to regulate them, threatening human rights, and challenging labour, environmental and other laws and regulations.Indeed, powerful private interest groups and their partners have gained excessive influence over policy making, thereby eroding both human rights and democratic processes. This corporate capture of the state has systemic and long-standing influence, and is backed by narratives arguing that (1) states, through processes of ‘rent-seeking’, are inherently economically inefficient; and (2) policy issues are of such technical complexity that ordinary people cannot understand, and therefore should not (or need not) engage with them. The disingenuous inference often drawn from these assertions is that private corporations operate in public interest; what is good for corporations is claimed to be self-evidently good for the state and those that live in its territory, including citizens.