PhD on PPP and the innovative environment

 PhD on PPP and the innovative environment

PhD Sofie Dam researches PPP’s effect on innovation and environment with a focus on Waste
CBS Public-Private Platform member and PhD fellow, Sofie Dam, investigates PPP's relation to a better environment and more innovative solutions in the hope for less waste. She present her PhD as:
The PhD on market development, public-private partnerships and green innovation was initiated in September 2011 and is co-financed by Copenhagen Municipality, Aarhus Municipality and Vestforbrænding. I am investigating if and how public-private partnerships can contribute to produce more innovative and sustainable solutions in municipal waste management, and how patterns of collaboration and innovation differ in Denmark and the UK. I am especially interested in the tensions between competition and collaboration in hybrid forms of governance and how this affects the possibilities or constraints for innovation.

Article in the Danish newspaper Politiken: PPP: This is how we generate a Denmark without Waste!
On October 7, the Minister of Environment, Ida Auken, launched a new resource strategy. The strategy holds the main argument: more recycling and less incineration and was launched with Auken’s message that waste should be looked upon as a resource that can be used again and again. The strategy can be found here.
Sofie afterwards published an article in the Danish newspaper Politiken in the section for Political Analysis. With the title: ‘PPP: This is how we create a Denmark without waste’, Sofie elaborates on how the new strategy stakes new political ambitions and sets up new freedom of methods for the municipalities to handle waste with more focus on recycling and less on incineration. Without more concrete guidelines or help regarding how to handle this process, the municipalities, however, might end up feeling that the challenge is too difficult. According to Sofie, public-private partnerships might be a handy tool in the development, establishment and implementation of solutions to meet the new challenges.
In the Danish municipality Vejle such a partnership has been established with the purpose of handling the new waste situation. The municipality invited private parts to help design good solutions. Based on the new experiences a formal public-private partnership was settled.
While Sofie is well aware that public-private partnerships are not just a fix-it-all-tool, and that it needs the right competencies and governance, she underlines that the method do provide great benefits and in some cases a quicker way to more effective solutions.

Find the article in Politiken Analyse by searching at November 18, 2013.

Learn more about Sofie.