Boštjan Ferk is the Managing Director and one of the Founders of the Institute for Public-Private Partnership, Slovenia. He is also an Assistant Professor for Public Administration at the Graduate School of Government and European Studies, Slovenia.
Boštjan Ferk was born in 1979 in Ptuj, where he also attended primary and secondary school. In 2003, under the wing of prof. Bojan Bugarič, Ph.D., he graduated from the Faculty of Law in Ljubljana. His thesis was entitled “Development Region as an Opportunity for Slovenia”. Boštjan continued his academic work, all the way to his PhD thesis “Public-Private Partnership Contract”, which he successfully defended in 2013.
He continues to upgrade his professional knowledge on PPP by attending conferences and seminars at home and abroad, as well as upgrading academic qualifications at foreign universities. For example, he has improved his language and professional skills in Australia, as a stagier at the European Court of Justice and in the cabinet of the Attorney General prof. Verica Trstenjak, Ph.D. The majority of the research for his Ph.D. thesis was conducted in Dublin, Ireland, and at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law in Hamburg, Germany.
His work comprises numerous articles for Slovenian and foreign journals, dealing mainly with the public-private partnerships, public procurement, and the cooperation between the public and private sector, as well as two monographs: Javne službe, državne pomoči in javno-zasebna partnerstva [Public Services, State Aids, and Public-Private Partnerships], and Pogodba o javno-zasebnem partnerstvu [Pubic-Private Partnership Contract]. The latter is based on Boštjan’s Ph.D. thesis and supplemented by the 2014 EU legislative package on public procurement and the award of concession contracts.
He is listed as one of Slovenian arbitrators with the Ljubljana Arbitration Centre at the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Slovenia. Boštjan regularly lectures at PPP seminars and trainings organised at the Academy for Administration of the Slovenian Ministry of Public Administration.
In his work, he collaborates with numerous European and international organizations that strive for development and implementation of public-private partnerships, e.g.: UNECE International PPP Centre of Excellence, Economic Forum, Centar za menadžment nabavki. He is also a member of the international committee PPP Development Center of the Russian Federation. He is passionate about reading the New York Review of Books and – if he finds the time – the books, and loves playing basketball. Right now, time is a bit short for visits to the basketball court, so he was forced to exchange them for a padel tenis.
