“People tend to joke about mood swings, saying ‘my mood swings throughout the day, I’m already a bit bipolar,’ or joke with each other saying ‘everything is bipolar.’ And it’s not quite like that, as bipolar disorder has a biological component.”

This is one of the statements featured in a short trailer on YouTube about bipolar disorder. The video is connected to the play Oxímoro, entre Solstícios e Equinócios (Oxymoron, Between Solstices and Equinoxes) by Marionet, a Portuguese theatre company that brings scientific research topics to the stage.

The play was developed through an in-depth collaboration with doctors, researchers, and patients, with the goal of informing and raising public awareness about bipolar disorder, helping to reduce the stigma surrounding this and other mental health conditions.

The project also included an analysis of audience responses to the performance, with a specific focus on emotional engagement. The results of this experience are described in a practice insight  published in the special issue of emotions and science communication in Journal of Science Communication (JCOM). According to the authors, the audience’s emotional response—empathy, emotional resonance, and personal identification—helped facilitate the assimilation of scientific information and contributed to reducing the stigma surrounding mental illness.

Abstract

Purpose – This paper studies the determinants for the desirability of the public-private partnership (PPP) mode in infrastructure development.

Design/methodology/approach – The author manually collects data on over 12,000 PPP projects in China, and regard the successful transition and abnormal termination as signals for the mode’s desirability and undesirability, respectively. Then, guided by relevant theories in the literature, the author investigates the impact of various project characteristics on the projects’ successful transition and abnormal termination.

Findings – First, execution-stage projects in industries where government support is indispensable, or where quality improvement is more important than cost reduction, face higher likelihood of abnormal termination. But such negative effects are mitigated if state-owned enterprises (SOEs) participate in the social party. Second, the structure of social party matters. The participation by private firms in the social party increases the termination likelihood, while the decentralization of the social party decreases it. Third, pre-execution projects with government payment or subsidies are more likely to enter into the execution stage.

Practical implications – Regulations on participation by SOEs in PPPs, such as policy [2023 No. 115] announced by State Council, should take industrial heterogeneity into consideration.

Originality/value – Using a large sample, the author empirically tests the seminal PPP-related theoriesin the literature. The author also uncovers some unique stylized facts about PPPs in China, especially the impact of SOE participation in the social party on PPP survival.