Most Western European local governments experience challenging times. While dealing with an extended period of fiscal austerity, the demand for high-quality public services remains ever-present. In addition, there is a surge of decentralization of tasks to the local level in several countries, which makes their mandate even more challenging and demanding. To face these challenges, local governments question and rethink their roles and services by employing different strategies. A major strategy is re-evaluating the service delivery arrangements.
For decades, academics have been trying to unravel the motivations of local governments to decide whether to provide services themselves (‘make’), if external (non-) private actors are engaged (‘buy’) or if partnerships are developed (‘ally’) (Skelcher, 2005). Current research typically relies on quantitative research methods. Since most of these studies employ a yearly cross-section of data, results are affected by a potential problem of reverse causality. Because of the cross-sectional nature, research becomes de facto static. It is indeed nonsensical to explain a twenty-year-old decision to outsource waste collection, by looking at the ideological profile of the current political coalition or the present presence of market competition. Consequence of this is the low explanatory power of the empirical studies. While there is no absolute agreement on what factors might influence the decision, these can however be comfortably grouped into 4 main categories: fiscal stress/restrictions and economic efficiency/cost reduction represent the economic family, while political interests (interest groups) and ideological attitudes serve as a political angle to study the choice (Bel & Fageda, 2017).
This papers also departs from this cross-sectional point of view relying on a Flemish service mapping survey of 2015 for a limited number of services and explain these arrangements using the above mentioned categories of determinants. In a next step, however, we employ an iterative-inductive approach to search for the true underlying mechanisms of why Flemish municipalities chose for a certain delivery mode for a service while others opted for another. Thus, rather focusing on service delivery an sich, our aim is to highlight service delivery decision-making and - practices. This paper devotes more attention on concepts as path dependency, catalyst factors and inertia, incrementalism and the impact of agency and structural elements (Carrozza, 2010). Empirical findings in the paper will help us to better understand local governments’ present-day service delivery arrangements. Service delivery modes are not continuously questioned, nor the same set of factors prevail in similar scenarios. The paper shows that a rather complex interplay of determinants causes a change in service delivery.
References
Bel, G., & Fageda, X. (2017). What have we learned from the last three decades of empirical studies on factors driving local privatisation? Local Government Studies, 1-9. doi:10.1080/03003930.2017.1303486
Carrozza, C. (2010). Privatising Local Public Services: Between Industrial Legacy and Political Ambition. Local Government Studies, 36(5), 599-616. doi:10.1080/03003930.2010.506975
Skelcher, C. (2005). Public-Private Partnerships and Hybridity. In E. Ferlie, L. E. Lynn, & C. Pollitt (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Public Management (pp. 347-370). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Public service delivery models: global debates, emergent practices
