Previous research has argued that public–private partnerships (PPPs) need collaborative interorganisational relationships (IORs) in order to deliver synergistic benefits: combined benefits that are greater than the sum of which each partner could have achieved alone. In contrast, this study of the Punjab Education Foundation's assisted school PPPs has found that despite the absence of many of the indicators of collaboration, the partnerships have delivered some synergistic benefits. This article explores how this has been achieved and highlights the importance of ‘cooperative IORs' in the assisted school partnerships. These findings thus question the necessity for collaboration in PPPs. They also suggest that a binary distinction between contractual and collaborative relationships in PPPs—prominent in the existing PPP literature—needs to be reconsidered. The article does not aim to decisively refute a body of existing research based on case study findings but rather questions some of the conclusions of this body of research, which seem to be worthy of further consideration.

中文翻译：

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重新审视公私伙伴关系中组织间合作关系与协同结果之间的联系：旁遮普教育基金会的学校伙伴关系的见解

先前的研究认为，公私伙伴关系（PPP）需要协作的组织间关系（IOR）才能产生协同效益：组合收益要大于每个合作伙伴单独获得的收益。相比之下，对旁遮普教育基金会（Punjab Education Foundation）的学校PPP进行的这项研究发现，尽管缺乏许多合作指标，但这种伙伴关系带来了一些协同效益。本文探讨了如何实现这一目标，并强调了“合作IOR”在辅助学校伙伴关系中的重要性。因此，这些发现质疑在PPP中进行合作的必要性。他们还建议，需要重新考虑PPP中合同关系和协作关系之间的二进制区别（在现有的PPP文献中很突出）。本文的目的不是基于案例研究的结果来果断地驳斥现有研究的内容，而是质疑该研究机构的某些结论，这些结论似乎值得进一步考虑。