This volume analyzes the conditions that lead to different levels of effectiveness among transnational pub lie-priva te partnerships (PPPs) for sustainable development working in areas of limited statehood. Defining PPP effectiveness as furthering the attainment of international development goals such as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), we use new empirical data obtained from expert interviews, documents, field research, and secondary literature to test a series of hypotheses about the relevance of various institutional design features for a partnership’s success. Our study focuses on 21 transnational PPPs (Chapters 3–5) and on 45 local-level projects carried out by four of these partnerships in Bangladesh, India, Kenya, and Uganda (Chapters 7 and 8). While we assume that institutional design matters, the question of which aspects of this design are the most significant depends on the type of partnership and the local context in which PPP projects are implemented. For the local-level projects, we adopt a comparative approach to analyze them in order to systematically assess the relevance of project-specific versus are a-specific conditions.