Six Case Studies from the Book

This page collects real case studies from Beyond PPP, from a contract that failed to a reference model cited internationally. Each case study comes with a short editorial framing and an excerpt from the book, with its exact chapter reference.

Case Study · Chapter 7–8

London Underground: Mistaking Complexity for Control

In 1992, the British government presented Private Finance Initiatives as the answer to crumbling infrastructure and empty public coffers. Its best-known result is the partial privatization of the London Underground in 2003: a 2,800-page contract spanning 30 years, split between the Metronet and Tube Lines consortia. Five years later, Metronet was insolvent.

"At the time the contract was signed, Transport for London did not have the technical capacity to properly assess Metronet's performance."

The book sets Metronet against the Jubilee Line Extension, a similarly complex project that succeeded because the contracting authority retained its technical expertise. The lesson is about whether the state still understands its own contracting partner.

Case Study · Chapter 9.1

Estonia: A State Built as a Digital Platform

1.3 million residents, a GDP smaller than the city of Stuttgart's, and still the most digitized public administration in Europe. Since 1997, Estonia has built X-Road, a decentralized data infrastructure in which the state sets the standards and private technology companies deliver the implementation.

"Today, an Estonian citizen files a tax return in three minutes, votes online in sixty seconds, and registers a company in an afternoon."

Estonia has since exported its architecture, including to Finland and Iceland. The book reads X-Road as the counter-case to London Underground: the same underlying question about state competence, with the opposite outcome.

Case Study · Chapter 18.4

ITZBund and IONOS: A Contract as Microcosm

In spring 2024, Germany's federal IT agency ITZBund awarded a contract worth up to 410 million euro for an air-gapped enterprise cloud, physically isolated from the public internet and hosted exclusively on German soil. The winning bidder was the European company IONOS.

"A European company won against the global hyperscalers, because the requirements were written so that data sovereignty and physical control outweighed market dominance."

ITZBund specified functional goals rather than technical solutions: availability, security level, portability, termination rights. The book reads the contract as a blueprint for exactly the outcome-based procurement also described in the essay on procurement law on this site.

Case Studies · Chapter 26

Four Countries, Four Models

Chapter 26 explores four international examples of public-private infrastructure governance, from a 200-year-old French state bank to Germany's most recent administrative reform.