This thesis addresses the potential of private-public partnerships (PPPs) to involve private forest owners in formal forest protection. These partnerships have been widely advocated as means to engage actors from diverse sectors in collaborative new relationships, formed in a step-wise manner, to improve management of resources that combine public and private goods. Nature Conservation Agreements (NCAs) are the first kind of PPPs to be used in Swedish forest protection. NCAs were introduced in 1993 and are agreements based in civil law between a private forest owner and the Swedish Forest Agency or County Administrative Board. Although NCAs were introduced to promote interest in nature conservation among forest owners, the response has been rather weak. Thus, in 2010 the government launched a pilot project called the Komet program, in which private forest owners in selected pilot areas initiated protective measures. Although criticized by environmental non-governmental organizations, the government decided after the pilot project terminated in 2014 to implement the Komet program’s working methods nationwide. In this thesis, PPPs’ potential to contribute to forest protection is analyzed by applying the “Ladder of Partnership Activity” framework, developed to study global PPPs, with appropriate modifications for a national context. The framework incorporates, in a stepwise manner, context, the actors’ motives relating to trust-building, the creation of collaborative advantages in the partnering process and the institutionalization of PPPs. The thesis contributes to an empirical understanding of top-down and bottom-up PPP processes. It is based on studies in which qualitative research methods were applied to examine selected cases presented in four papers, designated Papers I-IV. The main sources of information are qualitative interviews with involved forest actors and policy documents they have produced. Papers I and II focus particularly on trust-building and the partnering process as perceived by involved forest actors, while Papers III and IV address the institutionalization of PPPs and their requirements to change the political order of forest protection in accordance with governmental objectives. The results show that willingness to adopt PPPs is dependent on past experience of collaborative efforts. They also show there is substantial discretion in involved actors’ interpretation of prescribed guidelines, and their motives may vary substantially. However, as long as they share the same ultimate objective, i.e. to protect forests, PPPs may still be successfully established. A major potential problem is that public officials tend to prioritize protection of biodiversity, while forest owners want to protect social values and unproductive (“useless”) forests. Thus, shared motives are essential to establish trust and initiate collaborative efforts. The voluntary element of initiatives supported by the Komet program appears to be essential for deliberation. PPPs need to be implemented nationwide to be institutionalized. However, the Swedish government has not provided sufficient resources and leadership capacity to enable PPPs to play their envisaged role in its forest governance system. If the government wants to adopt bottom-up approaches, it needs to provide sufficient resources so that the partnerships does not compete with other formal instruments and protection arrangements. Furthermore, coordination within and between sectors needs to be improved to clarify the purpose of the policy recommendations.

This thesis presents two chapters on credence goods and one on ongoing partnerships in an infinitely repeated game. The chapters on credence goods focus on the welfare and efficiency of equilibria in overcharging models of credence goods, something which has not been explicitly addressed before. The chapter on partnerships presents a theory explaining ongoing partnerships as solving a commitment problem for clients. There is a small literature on partnerships, and this chapter represents a novel but complimentary approach to that literature. At core, chapters 2, 3 and 4 of this thesis ask the following questions respectively: Do competition and information increase welfare in credence goods markets? How do customers in credence goods markets discipline experts from committing fraud? Can these strategies be welfare ranked? Why do ongoing partnerships exist? What problem do they solve?

Thèse numérisée par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal.

Community engagement initiatives have experienced an increase in attention, appreciation, and participation among those in academic, nonprofit, and other community-based organizations over the past two decades. The purpose of this study is to explore the meanings of community-campus partnerships among stakeholders in the community and in academia towards the goal of generating a theory grounded in these data that will concomitantly contribute to the social work profession and the community engagement movement. Using as its foundation the shared interest among the social work profession and the community engagement movement on values and ethics, this study utilizes a traditional grounded theory methodology as a means to systematically examine the question “What does it mean to be involved in a community-campus partnership?” The theory that emerged from the data in this study is about what it takes to sustain partnerships between community and campus organizations. The final five themes found in this theory are: A strong foundation upon which the relationship is built; navigating the process of a partnership project; goodness-of-fit for all involved; resources; and impact. Overall, the theory of partnership sustainability draws the attention of partnership practitioners and stakeholders to the importance of relationships as being the core for any partnership activity. When contemplating how a particular resource, impact, process-related challenge and issue of partner match was addressed within their partnership, the participants continually came back to the idea that partnership sustainability can be traced back to the relationship between partners. Implications for further research involve a deeper study of the nature of relationships within community-campus partnerships; the organizational culture dynamics that are unique to academia; the nature, value, and perceived importance of research done in the community; and the intersectionality of student engagement and community engagement, particularly in an age of assessment and benchmarking.

Given the increasing proliferation of public-private partnerships (PPPs) in both developed and developing countries, and the huge challenges that are often associated with establishing and managing them, and ensuring that they achieve their objectives, it is important to understand multiple aspects of their operation. Whilst the structural and economic aspects of PPPs have long been recognised and researched, the relational aspects of PPPs remain under-researched. This thesis is a contribution to addressing this gap in the literature. It uses a dimensional approach to understand the nature of inter-organisations relationships (IORs) in PPPs and considers the factors that shape these relationships. It also investigates whether a particular pattern of relationships is needed for PPPs to deliver more than could have been achieved by each partner working alone (synergistic benefits). These issues are studied empirically in three educational PPP programmes in Pakistan. In two of these, not-for-profit organisations ‘adopt’ state schools. In the third, the state funds private sector schools on the condition that they offer free education to students and achieve threshold quality standards. A case study methodology is used and an integrative conceptual framework, derived from a wide-ranging literature review, is used to guide both data collection and analysis. The research finds that partners’ motives for entering into a PPP play a dominant role in shaping inter-organisational relationships. These motives are, in turn, influenced by a range of contextual and organisational factors. Inter-organisational relationships can be broadly characterised as collaborative, contractual, cooperative or conflictual. Whereas much of the existing literature emphasises that collaborative relationships are a prerequisite for PPPs to deliver synergistic outcomes, this research finds that these outcomes are also present in PPPs characterised by cooperative relationships. However, inter-organisational relationships in PPPs are not static; they develop and change over time. These changes result from a dynamic interplay between contextual factors, organisational factors, partner motives and the perceived outcomes of the partnership. The research reported in the thesis makes a number of contributions to knowledge. It sheds new light on the relational aspects of PPPs and offers a new conceptual framework for explaining and investigating inter-organisational relationships, which integrates insights from the largely separate literatures on PPPs and inter-organisational relations. It counters an apparent pro-collaboration emphasis in the existing PPP literature by documenting and explaining the benefits associated with cooperative relationships. It also offers new empirical evidence on the operation of PPPs in a developing country context, which contributes to redressing the predominance of evidence from developed countries in the existing literature. The insights from the research have theoretical and practical implications for the development and management of PPPs and future research in this area.

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / Since the advent of South Africa‘s democracy in 1994 there have been several changes in the policy and legislative arena specifically promoting public-private-partnerships in the health sector. These initiatives have given rise to opportunities for inter-sectoral policy transfer under the rubric of ―best practices‖. This exploratory study examines the character, obstacles and contested nature of a selection of policy transfers between private and public health institutions in a single province of South Africa. The study looks at the dynamics at play around envisaged, current and past transfers of policies and organisational practices in relation to administrative systems and technologies used in four different hospital settings – two public and two private hospitals in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa. This thesis explores the views of managers and labour organisations about policy transfer focusing on local contexts, and how various parties construct policy transfer, hence providing a perspective of policy at the ―plant‖ level. In this research, special focus is placed on different agents‘ role and understandings of their contexts and how and why policies move and contradictions of these developments. In-depth interviews were conducted at four major Eastern Cape hospitals. The thesis argues that in practice, policy transfer is messy, politicized and traversed by power and vested interests and that organised labour plays a key role in policy transfer process. The thesis focuses on the different philosophical/ideological underpinnings, socio-political values and operational environments in each sector. This study is designed to contribute to existing knowledge on practices particularly between the public and private sectors in order to widen the understanding of the complexity of transferability.

Research has shown that socially-focused partnerships that cross sectors (referred to as social partnerships within) are necessary in order to effectively address pressing societal issues such as poverty. Yet, in these complex organizational contexts, there is often variability within and between involved organizations as it relates to basic assumptions around work and the meanings given to practices at macro, meso and micro levels of analysis. Put differently, there are often a plurality of meaning systems at play in such multi-faceted organizational arrangements. Accordingly, the purpose of this dissertation was to understand to what extent multiple meaning systems exist in social partnerships focused on addressing multi-faceted societal challenges and, whether and how such differences in meaning systems are strategically negotiated over time. At a deeper theoretical level, this research was focused on illuminating the processes by which meaning systems are negotiated when organizational boundaries are blurred and when a plurality of meaning systems are at play, with a central focus on players that act as boundary spanners within these complex organizational contexts. To understand the complexities at play in social partnerships emanating from multiple meaning systems, I conducted a multi-site ethnographic study, involving in-depth interviews and participant observation, of the Greater Victoria Coalition to End Homelessness Society (Coalition) located in Victoria, British Columbia. In doing so, I utilized the principal literature streams that address multiple meaning systems at work: the culture literature in organization studies and the institutional logics perspective. As well, I incorporated other literatures based upon the emergent findings, namely organizational identity. Through this work I make a number of contributions within the area of sustainability, particularly the social partnership literature, as well as organizational theory. Empirically, I develop a process model that elucidates how players negotiate multiple meanings of organizational identity over time in a social partnership setting characterized by permeable boundaries and shared authority, at the group level of analysis. This is significant as we know little about how identity plays out in such multi-faceted organizational settings with continual blurred boundaries even as research has indicated that such arrangements are likely to surface identity issues among players (Maguire & Hardy, 2005). I also elucidate how individual players bridge across multiple meaning systems in a social partnership over time, answering the call for more research concerning the role of individuals and their interactions with organizations in the collaboration process over time (Manning & Roessler, 2014). To my knowledge, this work is one of the first of its kind to empirically explore tri-sector socially focused collaborations – involving players from the public, private and nonprofit sectors – that are more integrative and interconnected in nature (Austin & Seitanidi, 2012a) and that employs a process based perspective to understand how such collaborations unfold over time. In addition, I theoretically develop the link between institutional logics and organizational culture that emerged empirically via this study to guide future integrative work to holistically account for the multiplicity of meaning systems at work within and between such multi-faceted arrangements. / Graduate / 2020-04-01

A research report submitted to the Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Commerce (Taxation). Johannesburg, 2015 / Tax treaties have a developed language of their own within the field of international law. They may include terms that are unknown in particular jurisdictions of domestic law or therein defined differently. Because the language of tax treaties and domestic law differ from each other, the definitions of certain terms and income type under a tax treaty and under different states’ domestic law are not necessary identical. Despite these differences, tax treaty definitions must be used for tax treaty classification purposes, and domestic law definitions must be used for domestic law classification purposes. The tax definition determines the type of the income for tax treaty purposes even though the income would qualify under another income category under the treaty states’ domestic law. Similarly, the domestic tax law definition determines the type of income for domestic law purposes (Helminen 2010). In most instances the treaty definitions of the various types of income refer back to domestic tax law, and where the domestic tax law definition deviates between the two treaty countries, this may lead to the application by these countries of different articles of the treaty. If this is caused by the application of the domestic law, this is referred to as a conflict of qualification in the Commentaries to the OECD Model Tax Convention. In general a conflict of qualification refers to a situation where identical facts are treated differently for tax purposes in different countries. Such a conflict may either concern the subject or the object of taxation. Key words: Tax treaties, OECD MTC, Double Tax Agreements, double taxation, conflicts of qualification, hybrid entities, partnerships, fiscally transparent, domestic law, Mutual Agreement Procedures, permanent establishment.

It is a common misconception that the cross-sector partnership between private companies and environmental NGOs purely benefit financing and image possibilities. However, suppositions like these are worryingly out-of-date and do no longer correspond to the actual make-up, ambitions, effort, and functionings of said partnerships. Most companies use a concept called Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) when describing their sustainability work, often including partnerships with Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs). The term was coined at a time when sustainability work was less refined than what we see today, and while societal awareness and industrial appreciation for the importance of environmental agendas has developed, the term CSR and its definition has remained the same. This study interviewed three environmental NGOs and four private companies in Sweden in order to investigate the structure and outcomes of their current partnerships with the respective actor. The findings underline the need for an updated conceptual definition, that facilitates cross-sector partnership development parallel to societal development rather than to hold it back. With environmental threats winning the attention of both private and public actors in local as well as global settings, the issue of this conceptual misalignment and possible snag in efficiency that it may pose, becomes highly relevant.

O estudo teve como objetivo verificar a necessidade de maior atuação do Estado nas parcerias comerciais entre povos indígenas amazônicos e empresas para a comercialização de produtos florestais não madeireiros, como forma de garantir os direitos e interesses indígenas. No contexto de descentralização do Estado, fortalecimento de novos atores e articulação entre o setor público e privado, as parcerias têm sido estabelecidas na Amazônia com o objetivo de, ao mesmo tempo, promover o uso sustentável dos recursos e propiciar melhores condições de vida às comunidades florestais. Com a diminuição do Estado bem como argumentos que exaltam as vantagens dos mecanismos de mercado e auto-regulação, as parcerias comerciais em muitos países têm substituído o Estado em suas funções, acompanhadas de problemas. O estudo teve como objetivo investigar se é necessária maior atuação do Estado nas parcerias para evitar assimetria de poderes, garantindo os direitos e interesses indígenas. Para a pesquisa, foram coletados dados qualitativos em dois níveis: (i) dados secundários (dados publicados, relatórios e documentos) ou primários (entrevistas semi-estruturadas a atores-chave) relativos ao contexto geral das parcerias como um todo e (ii) análise do contexto específico de duas parcerias comerciais (análise documental e entrevistas semi-estruturadas): Baniwa - Tok & Stok (AM) e Yawanawá - Aveda (AC). Os resultados apontaram para a imprescindibilidade de nova atuação do Estado e da sociedade na definição de políticas e parâmetros legais claros para as questões das sociedades indígenas. Além de normas simplificadas e adaptadas aos moldes das sociedades indígenas, é fundamental propiciar maior participação destas na criação de políticas e projetos próprios. O estudo conclui que não se pode prescindir de um papel interventor responsável do Estado. A substituição total do Estado pelo setor privado em funções essenciais, por meio das parcerias, pode gerar problemas, conflitos internos, manutenção da situação de dependência, além de estímulo à diferenciação social. / The purpose of this study was to evaluate the necessity of a larger role of the State in the partnerships between Amazonian indigenous peoples and companies for the commercialization of non timber forest products, as a mean to guarantee indigenous rights. Within the context of decentralization of the State, empowerment of new actors and articulation between public and private sectors, partnerships have been established in Amazonia with the purpose of, at the same time, promoting the sustainable use of natural resources and providing better livelihoods to forest communities. As a result of a reduction in State\'s roles, as well as arguments exalting the advantages of market mechanisms and self-regulation, partnerships have been increasingly substituting the State in its functions in many countries, frequently accompanied by problems. This study had the purpose of investigating if a larger role of the State is necessary in the partnership context, in order to avoid power asymmetries and protecting indigenous rights. Qualitative data were gathered in two levels: (i) secondary data (publications, reports and documents) or primary data (semi-structured interviews to key-actors) related to the general context of the partnerships as a whole and (ii) analysis of the specific context of two partnerships (documental analysis and semi-structured interviews): Baniwa - Tok & Stok (AM) and Yawanawá - Aveda (AC). Results indicate the importance of an innovative role being played by the State and civil society organizations in the definition of policies and clear legal frameworks for indigenous peoples\' issues. Besides simplified rules, adjusted to indigenous societies\' concepts, it is essential to involve larger indigenous participation in the formulation of new policies and their own projects. The study concludes it is not possible to discard a responsible and interventionist role of the State. The total replacement of the State by the private sector in fundamental functions through partnerships may generate problems, internal conflicts, dependency maintenance and increase in social differentiation.