Towards a Design Framework for Legitimate Public Private Partnerships: A General Approach Applied to Innovative Renewable Energy Infrastructures

This article provides a framework to guide the choice and design of a fitting Public Private Partnerships (PPP), which is applied to a Dutch example of biogas/sustainable energy projects. The framework focuses on ‘legitimate public governance’, merging Beetham’s dimensions of legitimacy (legality, shared beliefs and consent) with three types of governance mechanisms (market, network and hierarchy). This leads to three types of PPP, and six phases of design, allowing governments to perform an ex ante analysis, by which legal form of PPP-type follows PPP-function, while securing andmonitoring legitimate public governance.