The importance of altruistic empathy and collaborative negotiation in public-private partnerships

The motivation in public-private partnerships (PPPs) is to harness the strengths of public and private partners to deliver essential public services. The ability to transfer risk to the private sector in PPP has been one of the reasons why the public sector relies on the private sector to participate in the development of infrastructure projects. In most instances, the public sector also believes that the private sector can fund the project at a lower cost. The private sector on the other hand, believes that they could achieve a strong financial return based on the concessions that the public sector will provide. If the sectors feel altruistic empathy to each other, they will realize that their original goals are not achievable. However, having understood the other sector’s needs and constraints, collaborative negotiation will yield a set of common goals. There are no commonly agreed frameworks on collaborative negotiation before PPP is formally established. The objective of this paper is to use deductive analysis to develop a conceptual framework for inquiring into the motivations of the public and private sectors during negotiation. This framework will provide insights on the extent of altruistic empathy of both sectors at the onset and how this altruistic empathy frames collaborative negotiation. This paper shows that collaborative negotiation will influence the success of partnerships and altruistic empathy is an important preamble to collaborative negotiation. This paper provides a frame of reference for future study using other research methods for further validation.