Handbook on the Business of Sustainability: The Organization, Implementation, and Practice of Sustainable Growth

Large inter-organizational projects in which public and private organizations jointly collaborate for a limited period of time are increasingly used to deliver vital products and services. Characterized by an involvement of different types of organizational actors, a complex set of organizational governance models, diverging goals and objectives, they defy the established perspectives on market-based organizations, given the importance attached to economic and social value creation and distribution through public-private collaborations. These projects attempt to incorporate social objectives, and pool multiple organizations' resources and design elements to create benefits that stretch beyond the economic gains to encapsulate broader social benefits, establishing public-sector infrastructure and delivering core services such as healthcare and education. In this chapter, the authors highlight four key imperatives of sustainable value creation and distribution in public-private collaborative projects, namely totality, inter-temporality, fairness and inclusiveness, and argue that those are closely linked to addressing three core tensions in collaboration - those of cooperation, coordination and cooptation. Drawing on a spectrum of public-private collaboration identified by prior studies, the authors define, unpack and discuss the three core tensions in detail and underline them with case examples. The authors then propose a framework that offers potential solutions to these tensions for business leaders and policymakers based on innovative governance approaches to drive cooperation, the role of novel organizational practices and structures to foster coordination and learning, as well as a synergistic approach to value creation and distribution within the wider project's ecosystem (to address cooptation). Lastly, the authors provide a detailed future research agenda for management scholars across disciplines to advance our understanding of public-private collaborative and other large inter-organizational projects.