The weight of Public Private Partnerships in Services for Early Childhood and Elderly People. A Case Study in the Framework of Rights

Abstract

The institutional arrangements through which social services are implemented can affect the way recognized rights are actually exercised by people. Given that this issue is unexplored, a cadastre of social services for children and elderly people was conducted in three municipalities of the Metropolitan Region in Chile. It evidences that the majority of social services addressed to these groups is carried out under public private partnerships (PPP), that there is a significant presence of non-market organizations as well as high heterogeneity in the types of funding for private services supply and among the municipal institutionalities. The spread of information and, in general, its inaccessibility justified this kind of study as a first step to the evaluation of quality, equity and accountability of services, issues that imperatively need to be analyzed if we seek to determine to what extent services under PPP manage to make effective the established rights.