Local service delivery is the delivery of public services at the local level and is a distinct domain of public policy. Local governments can be more reflective of local needs and interests and a prime driver of innovation in government practices; at the same time, local service delivery deals with some challenges, such as expertise concerns, steering problems, and the presence of economies of scale. [1] [2] [3] Local service delivery is a key topic of discussion for academics and practitioners in the wake of the decentralization and corporatization that occurred under New Public Management and in the wake of local austerity following the 2008 Financial crisis. [4]
Local service delivery can take place in many ways. Local services can be delivered directly by the municipality’s bureaucracy, by municipal corporations, by public-private partnerships, by inter-municipal cooperation, and by private organizations through contracting or privatization. [1] [4] [2] [3] Since switching between the multiple options of service delivery often incurs costs, there is often high path dependency in local service delivery that makes it difficult to easily adjust policy choices to changed political and economic environments.
While local government is not a necessary part of modern government, it is often an integral part. Local government is closer to the citizens than higher layers of government and can be more reflective of local needs and interests. [5]
Local government can be a driver of innovative government. Due to the frequent presence of competition between local governments and their sheer numbers, there is much diversity in local service delivery. The presence of networks allows limited policy learning between local governments, and so innovative ideas can spread and eventually make their way into other levels of government. [6]
Local service delivery involves expertise concerns. Since it is (due to geographic size) less likely that local governments possess certain types of expertise than higher layers of government, [7] they are more dependent on outside actors for service delivery, and yet less capable of monitoring them. Such steering issues are a source of inefficiency for local service delivery. [3]
It is often the case that service delivery gets costlier as the population gets smaller, since there are high fixed costs of public policy. Thus, cooperation is a central theme in local government for many services. [8]
Examples of local services include: [2]
A state-owned enterprise (SOE) is a government entity which is established or nationalised by the national government or provincial government, by an executive order or an act of legislation, in order to earn profit for the government, control monopoly of the private sector entities, provide products and services to citizens at a lower price, implementation of government schemes and to deliver products and services to the remote locations of the country. The national government or provincial government has majority ownership over these state owned enterprises. These state owned enterprises are also known as public sector undertakings in some countries. Defining characteristics of SOEs are their distinct legal form and possession of financial goals and developmental objectives, SOEs are government entities established to pursue financial objectives and developmental goals.
Corporatization is the process of transforming and restructuring state assets, government agencies, public organizations, or municipal organizations into corporations. It involves the adoption and application of business management practices and the separation of ownership from management through the creation of a joint-stock or shareholding structure for the organization. The result of corporatization is the creation of state-owned corporations where the government retains a majority ownership of the corporation's stock. Corporatization is undertaken to improve efficiency of an organization, to commercialize its operations, to introduce corporate and business management techniques to public functions, or as a precursor to partial or full privatization.
State ownership, also called government ownership and public ownership, is the ownership of an industry, asset, or enterprise by the state or a public body representing a community, as opposed to an individual or private party. Public ownership specifically refers to industries selling goods and services to consumers and differs from public goods and government services financed out of a government's general budget. Public ownership can take place at the national, regional, local, or municipal levels of government; or can refer to non-governmental public ownership vested in autonomous public enterprises. Public ownership is one of the three major forms of property ownership, differentiated from private, collective/cooperative, and common ownership.
A public–private partnership is a long-term arrangement between a government and private sector institutions. Typically, it involves private capital financing government projects and services up-front, and then drawing revenues from taxpayers and/or users over the course of the PPP contract. Public–private partnerships have been implemented in multiple countries and are primarily used for infrastructure projects. They have been employed for building, equipping, operating and maintaining schools, hospitals, transport systems, and water and sewerage systems.
New Public Management (NPM) is an approach to running public service organizations that is used in government and public service institutions and agencies, at both sub-national and national levels. The term was first introduced by academics in the UK and Australia to describe approaches that were developed during the 1980s as part of an effort to make the public service more "businesslike" and to improve its efficiency by using private sector management models.
In economics, a common-pool resource (CPR) is a type of good consisting of a natural or human-made resource system, whose size or characteristics makes it costly, but not impossible, to exclude potential beneficiaries from obtaining benefits from its use. Unlike pure public goods, common pool resources face problems of congestion or overuse, because they are subtractable. A common-pool resource typically consists of a core resource, which defines the stock variable, while providing a limited quantity of extractable fringe units, which defines the flow variable. While the core resource is to be protected or nurtured in order to allow for its continuous exploitation, the fringe units can be harvested or consumed.
Ecological indicators are used to communicate information about ecosystems and the impact human activity has on ecosystems to groups such as the public or government policy makers. Ecosystems are complex and ecological indicators can help describe them in simpler terms that can be understood and used by non-scientists to make management decisions. For example, the number of different beetle taxa found in a field can be used as an indicator of biodiversity.
Elinor Claire "Lin" Ostrom was an American political scientist and political economist whose work was associated with New Institutional Economics and the resurgence of political economy. In 2009, she was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for her "analysis of economic governance, especially the commons", which she shared with Oliver E. Williamson. She was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics.
Materials management is a core supply chain function and includes supply chain planning and supply chain execution capabilities. Specifically, materials management is the capability firms use to plan total material requirements. The material requirements are communicated to procurement and other functions for sourcing. Materials management is also responsible for determining the amount of material to be deployed at each stocking location across the supply chain, establishing material replenishment plans, determining inventory levels to hold for each type of inventory, and communicating information regarding material needs throughout the extended supply chain.
In business, overhead or overhead expense refers to an ongoing expense of operating a business. Overheads are the expenditure which cannot be conveniently traced to or identified with any particular revenue unit, unlike operating expenses such as raw material and labor. Therefore, overheads cannot be immediately associated with the products or services being offered, thus do not directly generate profits. However, overheads are still vital to business operations as they provide critical support for the business to carry out profit making activities. For example, overhead costs such as the rent for a factory allows workers to manufacture products which can then be sold for a profit. Such expenses are incurred for output generally and not for particular work order; e.g., wages paid to watch and ward staff, heating and lighting expenses of factory, etc. Overheads are also a very important cost element along with direct materials and direct labor.
Phonophoresis, also known as sonophoresis, is the method of using ultrasound waves to increase skin permeability in order to improve the effectiveness of transdermal drug delivery. This method intersects drug delivery and ultrasound therapy. Phonophoresis is able to achieve specific and efficient delivery of drugs that are delivered through the skin and ensure that the drug reaches the targeted area in the tissue environment. By assisting transdermal drug delivery, phonophoresis can help patients experience painless, minimal risk, and effective treatment.
Governance is a broader concept than government and also includes the roles played by the community sector and the private sector in managing and planning countries, regions and cities. Collaborative governance involves the government, community and private sectors communicating with each other and working together to achieve more than any one sector could achieve on its own. Ansell and Gash (2008) have explored the conditions required for effective collaborative governance. They say "The ultimate goal is to develop a contingency approach of collaboration that can highlight conditions under which collaborative governance will be more or less effective as an approach to policy making and public management" Collaborative governance covers both the informal and formal relationships in problem solving and decision-making. Conventional government policy processes can be embedded in wider policy processes by facilitating collaboration between the public, private and community sectors. Collaborative Governance requires three things, namely: support; leadership; and a forum. The support identifies the policy problem to be fixed. The leadership gathers the sectors into a forum. Then, the members of the forum collaborate to develop policies, solutions and answers.
Inter-municipal cooperation (IMC) is a generic term for all joint provision of public services between municipalities, who are normally but not necessarily neighbours.
The term ‘hybrid institution’ is not yet well-established or clearly defined in academic literature. German and Keller possibly introduced the term in 2009, describing it as "an institutional arrangement governing the interdependencies among discrete property holders and regimes". Abbot and Faude have suggested more recently that most areas in world politics today are governed "neither by individual institutions nor by regime complexes composed of formal interstate institutions. Rather, they are governed by “hybrid institutional complexes” comprising heterogeneous interstate, infra-state, public–private and private transnational institutions, formal and informal." Whether they are anything more than euphemisms for public-private partnerships, which are nothing new, is yet to be firmly established.
Policy alienation refers to a framework which examines the experiences of governmental employees with new policies they have to implement. It has been used to describe the experiences of front-line public professionals with new policies. It is defined "as a general cognitive state of psychological disconnection from the policy programme being implemented."
Dan Mendelson is an American businessman and healthcare consultant who founded Avalere Health, a Washington, D.C.-based strategic advisory company, after serving in the Clinton White House. His opinions have been cited in The New York Times,The Wall Street Journal, National Public Radio, and Bloomberg, among other news outlets. He is the author of numerous papers and several editorials.
A municipally owned corporation is a corporation owned by a municipality. They are typically "organisations with independent corporate status, managed by an executive board appointed primarily by local government officials, and with majority public ownership." Some municipally owned corporations rely on revenue from user fees, distinguishing them from agencies and special districts funded through taxation. Municipally owned corporations may also differ from local bureaucracies in funding, transaction costs, financial scrutiny, labour rights, permission to operate outside their jurisdiction, and, under some circumstances, in rights to make profits and risk of bankruptcy.
The multiple principal problem, also known as the common agency problem, the multiple accountabilities problem, or the problem of serving two masters, is an extension of the principal-agent problem that explains problems that can occur when one person or entity acts on behalf of multiple other persons or entities. Specifically, the multiple principal problem states that when one person or entity is able to make decisions and / or take actions on behalf of, or that impact, multiple other entities: the "principals", the existence of asymmetric information and self-interest and moral hazard among the parties can cause the agent's behavior to differ substantially from what is in the joint principals' interest, bringing large inefficiencies. The multiple principal problem has been used to explain inefficiency in many types of cooperation, particularly in the public sector, including in parliaments, ministries, agencies, inter-municipal cooperation, and public-private partnerships, although the multiple principal problem also occurs in firms with multiple shareholders.
The political systems of Imperial China can be divided into a state administrative body, provincial administrations, and a system for official selection. The three notable tendencies in the history of Chinese politics includes, the convergence of unity, the capital priority of absolute monarchy, and the standardization of official selection. Moreover, there were early supervisory systems that were originated by local factions, as well as other political systems worthy of mention.
Suzanne M. Rivera is an American bioethicist, science policy expert, and president of Macalester College. She is the first female and first Latina president in the college’s history. Rivera’s presidential Inauguration ceremony was held at Macalester on October 9, 2021. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz proclaimed it as "Suzanne M. Rivera Day" in the state.
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