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Introduction
This paper addresses the question of how and why public-private partnerships (PPP) projects succeed or fail, especially in the context of complex e-government initiatives. The challenges faced by a PPP project during its implementation and the issues of relationship and co-operation between the public and private partners need to be studied in detail.
The internet boom led to the emergence of e-government initiatives in the late 1990s. We define e-government as the capacity to transform public administration by using information and communication technologies (ICTs) to enhance the ease of access of government information and services to citizens, non-government organizations, and other government entities. The complexity of e-government projects being very high, their reported failure rates are also in the range of 60-80 percent (Heeks, 2006; Stanforth, 2010), resulting in significant loss of financial, human, and political resources, as well as loss of potential benefits of e-government to the stakeholders.
The PPP arrangement has been offered as a success strategy for e-government projects (Gil-García and Pardo, 2005; Chen and Perry, 2003). It is an arrangement between a public entity (government) and private entity (non-government) whereby, services traditionally delivered by the public entity are provided largely by the private entity under a set of terms and conditions well defined at the outset. PPP projects have become popular in a number of countries since they help governments in reducing their spending and borrowing, and enable them to leverage the efficiency of the private enterprise. Thus, PPP combines the accountability of the public sector with the efficiency of the private entities and help in sharing risks (Hodge and Greve, 2007). In recent times, several e-government projects are being implemented through PPP arrangements (Ruuska and Teigland, 2009; Sharma, 2007). However, partnerships, in general (whether in the public or private sectors), have often not delivered the expected outcomes, largely due to relationship issues between the partners (Diamond, 2006; Friend, 2006; Laffin and Liddle, 2006; Wettenhall, 2007; Lacity et al. , 2009). Hence, there is an urgent need for a closer understanding of relationship issues in e-government partnership arrangements.
Relationship issues in partnerships, both in e-government projects and others, are usually due to reasons like lack of shared vision, weak consensual decision-making capabilities, lack of respect and trust between partners,...