THE SOCIAL DİMENSION OF PUBLIC–PRIVATE PARTNERSHIP (PPP) INFRASTRUCTURE SPENDING

Public–Private Partnerships (PPPs) are long-term institutional arrangements that mobilize private finance and expertise to deliver public services. In Türkiye, PPP practice has broadly aligned with global trends, helping accelerate completion of large-scale infrastructure and alleviating fiscal pressure. The model distributes risks across design, financing, construction, operation, and maintenance phases, while preserving ultimate public responsibility—thus differing from outright privatization. Increasingly, PPPs are framed within sustainable project development, requiring the integrated consideration of economic, environmental, and—crucially—social dimensions. Yet social sustainability remains comparatively underexplored in both scholarship and practice. This study first delineates PPP concepts and variants, then examines infrastructure services with a focus on social aspects, and finally evaluates the social dimension of infrastructure spending within PPPs. It proposes a practical framework for embedding social components into project design to safeguard stakeholder interests, monitor societal outcomes, and strengthen the long-term sustainability and legitimacy of PPP-based infrastructure delivery.