The Partnership Most Countries Say They Want

Almost every government in the world now describes the private sector as a partner. It appears in national visions, in investment strategies, in ministerial speeches and in the opening remarks of nearly every economic forum. Yet the honest assessment, shared privately by many officials and many chief executives alike, is that the partnership rarely functions as well as either side hoped. Governments feel that business is opportunistic and impatient. Business feels that government is slow, inconsistent and difficult to read. Both are describing the same relationship from opposite sides of a wall.

Having spent close to two decades building a company from a single warehouse in Bolton into one of the largest online furniture retailers in the United Kingdom, and having then spent years advising senior figures on investment and international partnerships, I have sat on both sides of that wall. The gap is real, but it is not caused by bad intentions. It is caused by a structural mismatch in how each side is measured, how each side manages risk and how each side experiences time. Once those three differences are understood, the relationship becomes far easier to fix.

Why the Two Sides Misread Each Other

A government official is judged on process, fairness and the absence of scandal. A chief executive is judged on outcomes, growth and the efficient use of capital. These are both legitimate incentive systems, but they point in different directions. When an official adds a review stage, they are reducing their own risk. When a company asks to skip that stage, they are reducing theirs. Neither party is behaving unreasonably. They are simply optimising for different definitions of success.

Time is the second divide. In business, a delay is a cost that appears immediately on a balance sheet. Warehouse space is leased, staff are paid, stock depreciates and capital carries a price whether or not a decision has been made. In government, a delay often carries no visible cost at all, and may even be prudent. This asymmetry explains most of the frustration I hear in private meetings. Business is not complaining about scrutiny. It is complaining about scrutiny with no timetable attached.

The third divide is information. Governments frequently design policy for an idealised version of a sector, built from aggregated data and consultation submissions. Companies operate in the messy reality of that sector, where a single licensing requirement or customs classification can determine whether an entire product line is viable. When policy is written without that granular knowledge, it is not usually wrong in ambition. It is wrong in detail, and in commerce detail is everything.

Consultation Is Not the Same as Collaboration

The most common mistake I encounter is the belief that consultation constitutes partnership. A ministry drafts a policy, publishes it, invites written responses, holds a roundtable and then proceeds broadly as planned. The process is genuine, but it arrives too late. By the time a draft exists, the fundamental architecture has been decided, and business input is reduced to commentary on wording.

Effective collaboration begins earlier and feels less comfortable. It means inviting operators into the room while the problem is still being defined, before anyone has committed to a solution. In practice this means asking a logistics operator what actually slows a shipment before designing a trade facilitation programme, and asking a manufacturer where their capital genuinely gets stuck before designing an incentive scheme. The answers are often unglamorous. They involve documentation, timelines, staffing at inspection points and the predictability of small administrative decisions. They rarely involve the headline measures that dominate policy announcements.

This is the approach that shapes much of the advisory work I undertake for governments and private institutions. The most valuable contribution an advisor can make is often not a new idea but an accurate translation of operational reality into terms that policymakers can act upon.

Build Institutions, Not Events

Investment conferences, trade delegations and signing ceremonies have their place. They create attention, they legitimise a market and they allow relationships to form quickly. But they are a beginning, not an outcome. The countries that convert attention into capital are the ones that have built durable institutions capable of receiving interest and processing it.

That institution usually takes the form of a properly empowered investment authority or delivery unit. Empowered is the critical word. A body that can only forward enquiries to other ministries is a postbox, not an authority. A body that can convene ministries, commit to timelines, escalate blockages and be held accountable for resolution is a genuine partner. Investors do not require a guarantee of approval. They require a guarantee of process, and a single point of accountability when that process stalls.

The same principle applies to sector level engagement. Standing councils that meet on a predictable schedule, with published agendas and tracked actions, outperform ad hoc summits by a wide margin. Continuity matters more than ceremony. A modest meeting that happens every quarter for five years will change more than a spectacular forum that happens once.

Make the Private Sector Accountable Too

Partnership cannot be a one way demand for concessions. If governments are asked to be faster and more predictable, business must accept reciprocal obligations. That means committing to local employment and skills transfer rather than importing an entire operating team. It means honest disclosure of ownership and financing structures. It means paying suppliers on time, because a government that is asked to improve liquidity in the economy is entitled to expect the same discipline from large corporate buyers.

It also means resisting the temptation to seek bespoke advantage. Special arrangements negotiated for one company create precedent, and precedent creates inequity that eventually undermines the entire investment climate. The most sophisticated investors I work alongside understand this instinctively. They would rather operate in a transparent system with modest terms than a discretionary system with generous terms, because discretion cuts both ways and can be withdrawn by the next administration.

The Gulf Model and What Others Can Learn From It

In my role as Senior Advisor to HRH Sheikh Ahmad Bin Faisal Al Qassimi, and through my work as Chairman of the Advisory Board at OM International, I have observed the Gulf approach to public and private coordination at close range. Its defining feature is not generosity of incentives. It is institutional clarity. Free zones publish their rules. Authorities respond within stated windows. Sector strategies are documented and, crucially, they survive personnel changes. An investor can read the framework, model the outcome and proceed without needing a personal relationship to interpret the system.

The lesson is transferable and does not require sovereign wealth to implement. Publish the rules. Honour the timelines. Ensure that the answer a company receives does not depend on which official happens to take the meeting. These are administrative disciplines rather than expensive reforms, and they are available to any government willing to accept the accountability that comes with them.

The Value of People Who Have Operated a Business

One structural improvement is consistently underrated. Governments benefit enormously from having people in advisory positions who have personally carried commercial risk. Not consultants who have studied markets, but operators who have met a payroll during a downturn, absorbed a supply chain shock and made a decision knowing that the consequences would land on their own balance sheet.

That experience produces a specific kind of judgement. It teaches which regulatory burdens are genuinely material and which are merely irritating. It teaches how quickly commercial confidence evaporates when signals become inconsistent. Running a national retail and logistics operation through recession, currency volatility and profound changes in consumer behaviour taught me more about the practical effect of policy than any briefing document could. Governments that deliberately recruit that perspective make fewer avoidable errors.

What Good Looks Like in Practice

Effective collaboration has recognisable characteristics. Engagement begins at the problem definition stage rather than the drafting stage. There is a single accountable institution with authority to convene and resolve. Timelines are published and honoured, including the timeline for saying no. Obligations flow in both directions. Meetings are recurring and minuted rather than occasional and celebratory. And the framework is written so that it functions regardless of who occupies which office.

None of this is technically difficult. It is institutionally difficult, because it requires officials to accept measurable commitments and requires companies to accept transparency and shared responsibility. But the countries that manage it capture disproportionate investment relative to their size, while countries with superior natural advantages watch capital pass them by.

A Relationship Worth Getting Right

The economies that will perform strongest over the coming decade will not necessarily be those with the largest resources or the youngest populations. They will be those where public institutions and private enterprise have learned to work together with genuine competence: where a company can plan around government behaviour, and a government can rely on corporate commitments.

That relationship is built through repetition rather than proclamation. It requires patience, institutional memory and a willingness on both sides to be measured. It is, in my experience, the single highest return reform available to most emerging economies. For those seeking to understand how this work is structured in practice, further detail is available in my professional background, and enquiries regarding advisory engagements can be made through my office directly.