Choosing State Owned Enterprises over Public-Private Partnerships for Infrastructure Governance: Explaining Institutional Change with Evidence from Denmark’s Transport Sector

This paper shows how State Owned Enterprises are sometimes preferred over the more known Public-Private Partnership model in building new infrastructure. Debate on Infrastructure governance in the transport sector has been dominated by the Public-Private Partnership model. Transport infrastructure was the largest sector for Public-Private Partnership projects in value terms in Europe in 2015. Research questions are: How do modes of infrastructure delivery change between State Owned Enterprises and Public-Private Partnerships in the transport sector? Why has Danish transport infrastructure governance preferred the State Owned Enterprise model over the Public-Private Partnership model?The case of Denmark is examined where the State Owned Enterprise model is used for key transport infrastructure mega-projects. This paper uses theories of institutional change and focuses on gradual change mechanisms via the processes of displacement, layering, and conversion. The method is to map all Danish transport infrastructures; road network, bridges and tunnels, rail network, airports and harbors in order to focus on differences in the development in the use of modes of infrastructure delivery and see institutional changes over time. The renewed Danish model for state owned enterprises in the transport sector was chosen at a critical point in time when the Public-Private Partnership model was starting to grow in other countries. This State Owned Enterprise model combines a professional board, state guaranteed-loans and user charges. The State Owned Enterprise model was layered on the existing public provision of transport infrastructure and became locked-in for new transport infrastructure mega-projects. The results are relevant to other countries coping with choice between modes of infrastructure delivery and for a re-oriented academic focus on State Owned Enterprises as a research field worth exploring again

A split-GFP gateway cloning system for topology analyses of membrane proteins in plants

To understand the function of membrane proteins, it is imperative to know their topology. For such studies, a split green fluorescent protein (GFP) method is useful. GFP is barrel-shaped, consisting of 11 β-sheets. When the first ten β-sheets (GFP1-10) and the 11th β-sheet (GFP11) are expressed from separate genes they will self-assembly and reconstitute a fluorescent GFP protein. However, this will only occur when the two domains co-localize in the same cellular compartment. We have developed an easy-to-use Gateway vector set for determining on which side of the membrane the N- and C-termini are located. Two vectors were designed for making N- and C-terminal fusions between the membrane proteins-of-interest and GFP11, while another three plasmids were designed to express GFP1-10 in either the cytosol, the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) lumen or the apoplast. We tested functionality of the system by applying the vector set for the transmembrane domain, CNXTM, of the ER membrane protein, calnexin, after transient expression in Nicotiana benthamiana leaves. We observed GFP signal from the ER when we reciprocally co-expressed GFP11-CNXTM with GFP1-10-HDEL and CNXTM-GFP with cytosolic GFP1-10. The opposite combinations did not result in GFP signal emission. This test using the calnexin ER-membrane domain demonstrated its C-terminus to be in the cytosol and its N-terminus in the ER lumen. This result confirmed the known topology of calnexin, and we therefore consider this split-GFP system highly useful for ER membrane topology studies. Furthermore, the vector set provided is useful for detecting the topology of proteins on other membranes in the cell, which we confirmed for a plasma membrane syntaxin. The set of five Ti-plasmids are easily and efficiently used for Gateway cloning and transient transformation of N. benthamiana leaves