The confusion, about what is PPP, made its home in US

While UK, the "homeland" of PPPs, does call them PFI and number of other countries varies in how to name this basket of public private contractual relationships, US has contributed further to the confusion. It is not clear to me why suddenly all initiatives newly developed have to be called Public Private Partnership in the US. PPPs have generated a lot of excitement, but this excitement was not always accompanied by knowledge and understanding.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Governor of California did his homework and personally visited some of the Centers of Excellence in PPP like Partnerships UK of Partnerships of British Columbia, and as result he has quite strong understanding of PPPs and sophisticated approach to how this concept should be used for California benefit. Despite or perhaps because of the understanding, the term PPP motivated California to adapt its own acronym and call PPPs newly as "Performance Based Infrastructure" (PBI).

Most of "others" do not have this kind of spirit and just do call any relationship between public and private a PPP. Two of the most recent examples:

1) Selling “toxic” assets under Treasury Department’s Public Private Investment Program can hardly be recognized as a PPP, perhaps the only similar component is sharing the risks, but this is defined as

”Shared Risk and Profits With Private Sector Participants: Second, the Public-Private Investment Program ensures that private sector participants invest alongside the taxpayer, with the private sector investors standing to lose their entire investment in a downside scenario and the taxpayer sharing in profitable returns.” US Treasury Department Release on Public Private Partnership Investment Program

Private sector risking its investment and sharing of profits with taxpayers is not really PPP approach but rather asset investment (or joint venture). There is no whole life costing, no other than investment risk transfer, it is therefore not a PPP.

2) Public health insurance in the form of PPP is being proposed as a solution to the expensive private sector insurance. Public option in health insurance – why not? But why this has to be called a PPP when this is introduction of a public entity among privately operated health insurance companies? I have no clue what looks like PPP here.

And perhaps, it is not that essential, how we name things, as long as we understand, what we mean and others do understand, what we would like to say.