Joshua Newman, PhD Thesis Defence, Political Science
5:00 PM - 8:00 PM
May 22, 2013
Location: SFU Harbour Centre, The Repap Policy Room (1425)
Title: The Governance of Public-Private Partnerships: Success and Failure in the Transportation Sector
Abstract
Since the economic crises of the 1970s, the political climate in many developed countries has been reoriented from a focus on the public provision of goods and services to an emphasis on curbing government spending, reducing taxes, and limiting bureaucracy. As a consequence, alternative service delivery arrangements, in which non-government entities and private sector corporations are involved in public service delivery, have become increasingly popular in the last 30 years. The term “governance” is now commonly used to signify this shift away from a traditional hierarchical mode of government to a more horizontal environment of policy formulation and implementation. For many supporters of alternative service delivery, increased freedom for the private sector is regarded as the key to successful governance.
Public-private partnerships (P3s) are a family of alternative service delivery mechanisms that allow the private sector to finance, own, and deliver goods and services to the public through long-term contractual arrangements with governments and other public sector agencies. P3s fit comfortably into the logic of alternative service delivery, which implies that by removing some – but not all – elements of the public sector and replacing them with some – but not all – aspects of the private sector, a balance between public sector accountability and private sector efficiency can be struck. However, this presents an inherent conflict, as the public sector is viewed simultaneously as the problem and as the solution to improving public service delivery.
This inherent conflict in governance arrangements can sometimes lead to governance failure, a phenomenon that is not sufficiently understood. First, I show that governance failure can have negative consequences for the state and society. Then, I examine two case studies in P3 delivery of transportation infrastructure, the Canada Line in Vancouver, Canada and the Sydney Airport Link in Sydney, Australia, to determine how governance failure occurs and how it can be avoided. These two cases have similar technical parameters and political motivations, but in the Canadian case, where the public sector demonstrated policy leadership through the fostering of policy networks, through bounded-rational policy learning, and through a collaborative institutional approach to project implementation, successful governance was achieved. By contrast, the Australian case, in which the government was not substantially engaged in the partnership, resulted in governance failure. From an analysis of these two cases I conclude that public sector policy leadership is essential to the prevention of governance failure.
Haiyang Wang, Phd defence, Comp Sci
11:30 AM - 1:30 PM
May 30, 2013
Ph.D. Thesis DEFENSE
HAIYANG WANG
Master from Tongji University, CHINA 2005
Thursday May 30th, 2013 11:30 a.m. TASC1 9204 West
FROM PEERS TO CLOUDS: DISTRIBUTED RESOURCES FOR CONTENT DELIVERY AND USER COLLABORATION
In this thesis, we tackle the problem of content delivery and user collaboration with emerging Internet technologies. Our investigation starts from peer-to-peer (P2P) sharing with social relations to contemporary cloud computing with flexible resource provisioning. We seek to leverage distributed resources for efficient sharing and collaboration, which leads to a hybrid system design that seamlessly bridges users' local resources to public datacenters.
We first explore social-network-based optimizations in peer-to-peer content delivery. We give solid evidences that long-term social relations can be found and applied to enhance the sharing efficiency in peer-to-peer networks, and present practical implementation strategies for the popular BitTorrent system. We then investigate the performance of cloud-based file synchronization applications and identify the bottlenecks in their system design, in particular, the task interferences. We propose an interference-aware provisioning algorithm, which effectively mitigates the problem. We further examine the users' interactions in state-of-the-art cloud-based distributed interactive applications. We find that, despite the benefit in terms of cost savings and better scalability, the cloud-based deployment greatly increases the users' interaction latency. We demonstrate that a smart assignment algorithms for virtual machines can remarkably reduce such latency. Finally, we present a real-world system design that effectively bridges users' local resources to enterprise cloud platforms. Our measurements as well as system analysis indicate that it serves as a complement of great potentials to enterprise cloud services.
Ph.D. Examining Committee:
Dr. Jiangchuan Liu, Senior Supervisor
Dr. Mohamed Hefeeda, Supervisor
Dr. Qianping Gu, Internal Examiner
Dr. Kui Ren, External Examiner
Dr. Steven Pearce, Chair
