Legal and Jurisprudential Study of the Public-Private Partnership Contracts in the Iranian legal System

As the public sector debt has increased over the past few decades, the importance of using the capacities of the private sector is noticed more than ever; However, operationalizing a public-private partnership contract requires an appropriate legal basis depending on the subject of the partnership and the form of contract. Although, in some cases, the legislator has pointed out the government’s duty, in general and temporarily, to make use of public-private partnership in Iran, the problem of choosing an appropriate form of such partnerships is still existing regardless of the existence of jurisprudential origins of these kind of contracts. Even though the totality of the partnership contracts refers to the partnership contract in jurisprudence, in some cases it moves away from partnership contract and approaches subjects such as persons’ rent and contract of reward (Ja'alah). Even if in the current Iranian legal system, there are opportunities for making use of a variety of civil partnership and service contracts for public-private participation, this research and its findings show that construction contracts, operation, transfer (BOT) are the most appropriate form for such partnerships.