A contested organizational field perspective of the diffusion of public–private partnership regimes: evidence from India

Abstract

Given the quantum of infrastructure that needs to be developed in India over the foreseeable future, private sector participation in infrastructure development is inevitable. The Government of India has taken several steps to enable public–private partnerships (PPPs) for infrastructure development at the state and municipal levels. While these schemes are available for most Indian states, their adoption has varied considerably. Some states have embraced the notion of PPPs and have leveraged the incentives and schemes initiated by the central government to craft vibrant PPP programmes. Others have chosen to ignore PPPs or create hybrid institutional forms for project delivery. In this paper, we analyse how the institutional environment for PPPs has evolved differently in three demographically similar states—Gujarat, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. We make use of a contested relational perspective of organizational fields involving the use of strategic action fields as a theoretical framework to understand the dynamics that led to the evolution of PPP-enabling fields in these states. We find that even under coercive, central, isomorphic pressures, PPP-enabling fields are highly contested by field members and field settlements are a result of the interplay of various relational interactions between participants. This paper contributes to a better understanding of the dynamics involved in the evolution of organizational fields and furthers our understanding of the context-based settlement within these fields.