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Evaluations of public service collaborations tend to ignore time and timing as potential explanatory variables. Drawing on theories of environmental dynamism, organizational inertia, accountability 'drift', and isomorphism, we test whether the timing of inter-municipal cooperation, and its duration, affect financial performance for solid waste collection inter-municipal partnerships in the Spanish region of Catalonia over the period 2000–2019. Though still present and significant, the cost advantages of cooperation declined over this period due to population growth and reduced interdependence between municipalities. Timing of cooperation has no effect on savings; although early-adopter and follower groups differ in policy objectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate how the reorganization of the service-delivery 'machine' is resulting in a hybridization of NPM and post-NPM principles. We compare reform trajectories in Italy and Spain to illustrate and interpret a combination of reorganization recipes that, from both the provision and production sides, affected service delivery; and how the NPM and post-NPM principles have been followed. Our analysis of how organizational structures for public service delivery have been reformed shows that reformers are increasingly induced to adopt a shopping-basket approach, leading them to use different menus and ingredients, mixing them, to create recipes that are better suited to domestic tastes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today's technological advances have created new channels for the collaboration of local governments with citizens, who can perform the role of both partner and customer in public service delivery. This article examines an initiative in Barcelona in which citizens monitor and evaluate public services using a feedback system to register their complaints. Specifically, it analyzes how socioeconomic factors, political activism, and partisan alignment influence citizen complaints about eight urban public services in Barcelona. Using a panel of monthly district-level observations from the city's feedback system for 2014 to 2019 and fixed-effect estimations, the results show that political participation is related to a higher propensity to complain, while economic status, educational attainment, and partisan alignment do not have a significant association with complaints. These findings are then considered and discussed in relation to a survey of citizen satisfaction with urban public services in Barcelona. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interdependence is typically regarded as the cause of inter-organizational collaboration. But it is also a consequence. Collaboration itself creates new interdependence as partners become more entwined in one another's operations and experience the vetoes, compromises, delays, and risks inherent in joint working. This paradox – mitigating one set of interdependencies by creating another – renders collaborative relations inherently unstable. Dissolution may occur if "ex-post" interdependence becomes more troublesome than the original "ex-ante" trigger for the partnership. We test this proposition through comparative analysis of 13 sustained, aborted, and dissolved inter-municipal cooperations in English local government. Ex-post interdependence was most pronounced in those partnerships that ended in dissolution, and informed the design of replacement arrangements. It was also a contributory factor in the abortive cases. But ex-post interdependence was minimized in the group of sustained collaborations by management actions that streamlined the coordination burden imposed by joint working. These findings have implications for partnership design, the collaborator's skillset, and theories of collaborative public management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inter-municipal cooperation, where two or more local governments jointly provide one or more public services across their jurisdictions, is an increasingly prevalent mode of public administration. In part, this reflects the limited success of prior rounds of privatization and amalgamation reform – and the continuing desire to economize and improve regional coordination. In part, it speaks of the wider policy fashion for seeking collaborative solutions to public problems. This article introduces a special issue on "the drivers and effects of inter-municipal cooperation." It reviews the current evidence base and the contributions of six papers, and suggests productive avenues for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the public and private labor markets are marked by significant differences in the institutions of wage formation, very few studies have examined workers' wages and employment in the public and private sectors when solving the same tasks. Focusing on government contracting out, we examine the changes in work income, employment, and government income benefits when public workers are transferred from a public to a private employer due to contracting out. Drawing on theories on wage gaps between the public and private sectors and the property rights literature, we develop novel hypotheses about how individual characteristics of workers moderate the impact of contracting out on workers. Using high-quality individual-level Danish register data, we establish a worker treatment group who experienced contracting out and match them with a similar group of public workers who did not. Difference-in-difference estimation with coarsened exact matching suggests that workers overall experience a significant decline in work income and employment, albeit with major intergroup differences across gender, skills, and age. Our sub-group findings show that female, low-skilled, and younger workers pay the highest price for government contracting out, both in terms of salaries and employment. We discuss how economic theories of public‒private gaps in wage setting can be combined with public administration theories of contract design and monitoring to develop improved—and possibly more equitable—conditions for workers when governments contract out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]