The authors make an attempt to establish a relationship between the effectiveness of the institution of public-private partnership (PPP) and its ability to act as a development tool for resource regions. The methodology of the study included two stages. At the first stage, the problem of determining the resource regions and the approaches to their identification were outlined. The second stage involved an analysis of existing approaches to the evaluation of the PPP institution and the issue of assessing its effectiveness. The approaches have been classified into three groups; assessment basis, calculation criteria and algorithm for the evaluation methodology have been identified. At the third stage, the authors used the theory of fuzzy sets for a comprehensive assessment of the effectiveness of the PPP institution from the perspective of reducing the resource dependence of regions. Four clusters have been revealed, their comparative characteristics are given in the article. It is shown that high indicators of the development of the regulatory framework and the institutional environment do not ensure the effective development of the institute in the region. It is necessary to revise the initial expert evaluation of the criteria, refine the weights of PPP performance assessment factors, and re-clustering. The degree of development of the PPP institution is not sufficient to reveal the relationship with the degree of resource dependence.