When separate organizations merge their back office functions

Shared services can deliver efficiencies but carry hidden costs, write Muiris MacCarthaigh and Thomas Elsto

New development: scarcity, policy gambles, and ‘one-shot bias’—training civil servants to speak truth to power

Allocating scarce resources to meet policy objectives incurs opportunity costs. A vital element of ‘speaking truth to power’ thus involves officials advising ministers on the opportunity costs of high-risk ‘pet projects’. In democracies, the brevity of ministerial office can produce ‘one-shot bias’—radical policy-making that deploys ministers’ time-limited powers to the full, yet risks producing significant opportunity costs for public service organizations. Examples include the UK’s recent social security, healthcare and European policies. Training in the economics of organization, development of new techniques for coping with uncertainty in opportunity-cost estimates, and stronger incentives for decision-makers to consider ‘benefits foregone’ by their actions could all provide greater protection against the downsides of one-shot bias

Efficiency and legitimacy in inter-local agreements: why collaboration has become a default choice among councils

Over 97 per cent of English local authorities cooperate with one another, providing common public services across separate council areas. Ruth Dixon and Thomas Elston consider how and why this occurs. In a follow-up to their previous post, they find that propensity to collaborate is unpredictable, but partner choice can be partly explained by geographical proximity of councils and similarities in organizational and resource characteristics. Contrary to the view that collaboration is a wholly ‘rational’ strategy chosen simply to improve service costs or quality, therefore, this analysis suggests that both efficiency and legitimacy influenced reform choices

Choosing Equipment Size for Efficient Energy Use.

4 p

Gear Selection and Engine Speed.

2 p

Radial Tractor Tires.

2 p

Controlling Tractor Wheel Slip for Efficient Operation.

4 p

On-Farm Fuel Storage.

2 p

Reinterpreting agencies in UK central government: on meaning, motive and policymaking

This thesis is a qualitative and interpretive exploration of continuity and change in the role of executive agencies in UK central government. Its three objectives are: (i) to test the longevity of the semi-autonomous agency model first introduced by Conservative governments after 1988; (ii) to explore the department-agency task division in the policymaking processes supposedly fragmented by this ‘agencification’; and (iii) to evaluate the paradigmatic testament of contemporary agency policy and practice in Whitehall. The thesis builds from an extended case study conducted during the 2010 Coalition Government in the Ministry of Justice and three of its agencies – the National Offender Management Service, HM Courts and Tribunals Service, and the Office of the Public Guardian. Social constructivist meta-theory and the application of narrative and discourse analysis together make for an account of interpretive transformation that is theorised by discursive institutionalism. Substantively, the thesis first describes an asymmetric departure from the ‘accountable management’ philosophy which the 1988 Next Steps agency programme originally epitomised. Agency meaning is multivocal, but contemporarily converges towards accountability and transparent corporate governance, rather than managerial empowerment, de-politicisation and decentralisation. Secondly, institutional preservation of the policy-delivery work dichotomy is registered, yet found to be a poor descriptor of both historic and contemporary policy processes. Agency staff act as policy initiators and collaborators, contrary to Next Steps’ quasi-contractual, principal-agent logic, and further evidencing the departmentalisation of the once arm’s-length agency model. Thirdly, and paradigmatically, while no unidirectional trend is found, the thesis adds to the growing literature positing some departure from the former ideological and practical predominance of ‘new public management’. In so doing, it also demonstrates the challenges faced by large-N population ecology and administrative systems analysis – the favoured methodology in much international agencification scholarship – in accounting for continuity and change in policy, practice and paradigm

Disentangling the separate and combined effects of privatization and cooperation on local government service delivery

Inter-municipal cooperation is often regarded as an alternative to privatizing local public services. But cooperation and privatization can also be combined into a composite reform package, where several municipalities jointly issue contracts relating to multiple jurisdictions. Evaluating these ‘hybrid’ reforms rests on disentangling the separate and combined effects of cooperation and privatization. This we undertake for the case of solid waste collection in the Spanish region of Catalonia, using environmental protection as our focal performance metric. Drawing on two waves of data (for 2000 and 2019) for a sample of 186 municipalities that mix public and private with cooperative and autonomous service delivery, we show that superior performance among reformed municipalities is initially confined to those cooperations involving public production. But latterly, any form of cooperation, using public or private production, resulted in significant gains. This reinforces the need for evaluators to isolate the (changing) ‘active ingredient’ in hybrid reforms