Introduction

For a number of chapters we have looked at infrastructure banks and partnerships, focusing on what they deliver in practice. Our aim has been to learn from experience when modeling our own domestic bank. This chapter looks at an important movement around the world that is under way right now. From Latin America to Africa, we live in a period of widespread renegotiations of extractive concessionary public-private partnership (P3) contracts. Almost universally, government-driven renegotiations are justified based on domestic demand. In other words, arguments are made by politicians, protestors, citizens, and others that the legacy of the privatization of natural resources represents a usurpation of ownership by a foreign entity over a national birthright. Claimants argue that foreign control over P3s is akin to neo-colonial rule. This argument harks back to the last period of renegotiations and cancellations – the initiation of the decidedly anticolonial New International Economic Order. The government thus acts as an instrument of the people to take back control of a national property.

This discussion of renegotiations highlights the fact that partnerships themselves can be dramatically reconfigured over time. Moreover, it is not always clear that shifts in the nature of partnerships result in more equitable outcomes. For this reason, as we revisit and reforge our own partnerships, it is important to benchmark them against both what has gone before and the types of issues that countries around the world have faced. This inequality that might inhere not only in partnerships but also in their renegotiation was also a persistent feature in the American nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century railroads.