Collaboration in Public Services

The Challenge for Evaluation

Bill Jenkins, Andrew Gray, Bill Jenkins, Frans Leeuw, John Mayne

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138508248
• eBook ISBN: 9781351323666
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The International Group for Policy and Program Evaluation (INTEVAL) serves as a forum for scholars and practitioners of public policy to discuss ideas and developments as a community dedicated to enhancing the contribution of evaluation to government. From the group's studies has emerged a concern with the impact of public management reforms. Collaboration in Public Services examines collaboration in the delivery of public policies and identifies the challenges for policy and program evaluation.

Written by a mix of academics, program managers, evaluators, and auditors, this volume explores the forms and challenges of collaboration in different national contexts. Chapter 1 introduces the notion and manifestations of collaboration and discusses emerging issues. Chapter 2 examines partnerships and networks of public service delivery. Chapter 3, drawing on Dutch and British data, reveals the QUANGO as both a collaborative end and means. Chapter 4 analyzes Israel's push to enhance collaboration with voluntary organizations. Chapter 5 examines the Canadian and Danish experiences.

Chapter 6 suggests that the creation of markets to improve quality has not been totally successful at least in Nordic countries. Chapter 7 suggests that traditional service values such as trust and parliamentary accountability are challenged by the complexity of collaboration, but, using illustrations from Canada and other OECD countries, argues that results-based governance can increase trust, flexibility, and empowerment. Chapter 8 demonstrates from Dutch and Canadian experiences that auditor responses to collaborative delivery tend to overlook traditional roles as guardians of accountability on behalf of parliaments. Chapter 9 deliberates the efficacy of programs involving multiple partners. Chapter 10 discusses the lessons and challenges of evaluation and collaborative government.

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Collaborative Government and Evaluation: The Implications of a New Policy Instrument

Andrew Gray, Bill Jenkins, and Frans Leeuw

The overall objective of this book is to examine, in a variety of different national contexts, the emergence or rediscovery of collaborative mechanisms of policy delivery and implementation. We are therefore less concerned with collaboration per se and its merits as the challenges these developments pose for mechanisms of policy and program evaluation. This opening chapter sets out the background to these developments and discusses some of the salient conceptual issues that are engaged by later chapters. It reviews aspects of the recent debate on policy networks and collaborative government for many of current deliberations (practitioner and academic) are embedded therein. The discussion then explores collaborative government and its mechanisms in greater detail, outlining some of the various contemporary manifestations of these as policy instruments and the problems of transplanting them into different political and social contexts. In all this the merits of collaboration are taken as problematic rather than assumed and some of the costs and benefits of adopting this instrument are assessed. We then turn to examine evaluation and offer some preliminary thoughts on the adequacy of evaluative mechanisms to cope with what many see as new and demanding challenges. Finally, we set out the focal questions explored in different ways by the authors of subsequent chapters.

Policy Delivery Networks and Collaborative Government

In early 2001 a group of senior British civil servants, ministerial advisers, audit officials and representatives of agencies and voluntary organizations held a seminar to discuss better policy design and delivery. Organized by the Performance and Innovation Unit (PIU) of the UK Cabinet Office, this meeting sought to encourage “a more rigorous thinking about delivery issues in government” (PIU 2001: 3). It was pointed out that policy implementation in the “real world” was often radically different from that portrayed by traditional political or management models. In particular, delivery was “a more circular process involving continuous learning, adaptation and improvement.” while in the long run it was “more efficient and effective to motivate and empower rather than to issue detailed commands” (PIU 2001: 4). Of particular importance was the concept of joining up within government itself and more widely by building up local capacity and community engagement.

Something similar has been evident in the United States. Agranoff and McGuire, for example, argue that public management in the twenty-first century is taking place in a new and complex world where the old models of federalism are no longer adequate. U.S. federalism is a form of government under pressure: “as policy responsibilities between national and sub-national governments have evolved and devolved, governing authority has overlapped to a point where all actors are involved simultaneously to varying degrees” (2001: 671). Such a recognition has led to a focus on intergovernmental management. Practitioners and academics have begun to search for models to explain the new world of twenty-first-century federalism and the way actors seek to cope both by employing tried and tested traditional models (e.g., top down management) as well as new and emergent forms (e.g., networks). Drawing on empirical studies of urban economic development (Agranoff and McGuire 1998a; 1998b) and rural development (Radin et al. 1996), Agranoff and McGuire argue that a new model of governance is emerging characterized by less federal control and more intergovernmental collaboration manifested in increased involvement of state, local, private and voluntary (third sector) agencies (further see below).

In the Netherlands also partnership between governments, private parties and civil society, including grass-roots movements, is becoming a buzzword. Using collaborative arrangements to secure improved standards of education, for example, was the subject of particular parliamentary discussion from May 2000. And partnership extends to communication with stakeholders about the rationale and impact of the collaboration. Simultaneously, the lack of collaboration has been a focus of attention in recent inquiries including of the Enschede disaster (the explosion of a fireworks factory leading to the destruction of a large part of the city of Enschede). Here failures between the layers of government were identified as causes of the disaster.

Some might regard these developments as in striking contrast to the thrust of the past quarter of the twentieth century. During this period a volcano of reform has erupted almost relentlessly against the traditional collectivist values of public service. For some this has been a mission against the scale of government (government as part of the problem rather than as part of the solution). For others, it has been a campaign to bring the functional discipline of private sector management to public services.

It would be an oversimplification to suggest that there has been uniformity in this reforming ideal. Not only have there been important variations in scope and scale between countries, many of the developments have not always been mutually consistent. Nevertheless, there have been common elements either new to public policy or applied in new ways and contexts. These include:

• Market or market type mechanisms designed to provide a demand and supply function and shape resource allocation through contracts;
• Increased regulatory regimes to oversee these mechanisms;
• Disaggregated service organizations characterized by designated agencies;
• Flatter hierarchies and streamlined organizational processes;
• Local rather than national personnel regimes governing contracts, pay and conditions;
• Performance regimes by which agencies and staff work to pre-set targets;
• Financial regimes of cost reduction, external funding arrangements and accruals accounting;
• Emphases on quality of service and consumers as customers.

The manifestation of these reforms has been so evident and widespread that some have labeled them as New Public Management (NPM). Here associated patterns of relationships in service provision have suggested a shift towards a system of governance in which economic, organizational, political and technical contexts have forged increasingly mixed economies in the provision of public goods and services. In this, intensifying competition has been a striking characteristic.

Thus, the British PIU exhortation to “join up” government may be seen to question the rise of the competitive ethic in public services and challenge traditions of departmentalism, audit, and accountability. The suggested new key to service delivery is organizational learning in which evaluation has a key role to play in developing and sustaining the capacity for learning in the policy delivery network. Perhaps this is no more than political opportunism as new labels are found for old practices. On the other hand, the experience of the more competitive emphasis in policy delivery has led some in government to perceive a loss of values of collective provision including those linked to more decentralized and localized capacities. Moreover, intractable problems such as social exclusion, urban regeneration and crime prevention appear to demand systemic or holistic interventions involving a multiplicity of organizations and actors. Thus, the PIU paper may be seen as an attempt to revive collaborative mechanisms as a policy instrument.

If some of the developments discussed above (e.g., in the Netherlands and the UK) share something of a philosophical backing for collaboration, other countries have come to develop collaborative arrangements, or at least focus on them, for somewhat different reasons. In Canada, for example, public sector reform has been sold more pragmatically. Here the thrust for collaborative arrangements has been as much fiscal pressure, political desire (in a federal and multicultural polity) to lock other levels of government into joint efforts or, more simply, recognition that with so much overlapping jurisdiction more formal partnership is administratively functional.

There is a suggestion, however, in these British, American, Canadian and Dutch experiences that genuine collaborative arrangements might constitute a new governance. Such an argument builds on the work of Kickert et al. (1997), Rhodes (1996), O’Toole (1997) and others on network and network management. Put briefly the case is that experiences in the United States, Europe and many other industrial countries point up policy delivery problems (dating from the 1970s onwards) and a frequent loss of control by political authorities. Strategies to overcome such difficulties initially included the new public management devices described above but have recently emphasized networks and interorganizational arrangements. In such systems participants are effectively interdependent and no one actor may be effectively in control. This, in turn, has led to the “hollow state” thesis (Milward and Provan 1993). In such a context governments now have to establish ways to utilize and manage the new collaborative arrangements, many of which challenge traditional ways of political operations (Osborne and Gaeblar 1993; Mandell 1999, 2001).

Thus, collaborative arrangements may involve more of a cultural change than anything seen under the competitive emphases of new public management. This is reinforced by British experience in which “the absence of integrated working is long standing, culturally embedded, historically impervious, obvious to all concerned and deeply entrenched in central and local government” (Stewart 2000: 105). As a result many efforts at collaboration have floundered, trapped in a political maze of entrenched interests and characterized by a failure to learn or transfer knowledge or innovation. Thus, for Stewart, “there needs to be more rigorous thinking about the nature, forms and terms of inter-organizational collaboration” (2000: 107).

So, what is collaboration in service provision and what are its implications for evaluation and the political processes it serves? This volume provides an initial search for answers to these questions. The remainder of this chapter offers an overview of the manifestations of collaboration and evaluation and sets out some of the relationships between them.

Collaboration

In June 2001, Britain’s New Labour government secured a second term in office with a massive (and almost unchanged) parliamentary majority. However, the electoral turnout, at less than 70 percent and among the lowest ever recorded, would probably not have surprised U.S. political scientist Robert Putnam, who would argue that this decline in political participation reflects a lack of confidence in government and legitimacy common to many advanced industrial countries reflecting social fragmentation. Putnam’s thesis, expressed most recently in Bowling Alone (2000), is that in spite (or perhaps because) of a market driven economy and new public management, Western industrial societies, in particular the U.S., have been characterized over the last two decades by politics of disengagement. This disengagement is evident, for example, in sharp falls in group and organizational membership, the erosion of solidarity and trust and a wider detachment from the political process. The consequence is a decline in state capacity and efficiency and a weakening of civil society (Ashbee 2000).

Key to these developments is what Putnam views as the erosion of social capital divided into bridging (inclusive groups and networks) and bonding (wider networks for developing and mobilizing solidarity). For Putnam “bonding social capital constitutes a kind of sociological superglue whereas bridging social capital provides a sociological WD 40” combining to trigger powerful social effects (Putman 2000: 23). He argues, therefore, that there is a vital link between community capacity and social capital, the latter being crucial to social and political processes thorough developing and sustaining such values as trust, reciprocity and interdependence. The manifestation of this is in powerful social networks and strong self-sustaining organizations.

The debate on social capital is, however, not clear-cut. Different interpretations of the central concept bring different prescriptions from collaboration and democratic enhancement through community empowerment to a case for less state intervention and a building up of voluntary activity (Social Exclusion Unit 2000b: 52-3). There have also been strong attacks on the broader Putnam thesis both for its inaccuracy in analyzing societal developments and in its prescriptions for rebuilding society in the United States and elsewhere (Ashbee 2000).

This debate is important here for offering evidence to support the case of a decline in civic engagement and social communion that may in turn explain some of the difficulties governments face in policy delivery. The increasing emphasis on the operation and language of market mechanisms for determining the content and cost of public service, for example, may have contributed to fragmentation and individualization by eroding organizations and practices based on more socially cohesive mechanisms and values. When the response to such delivery difficulty has been to reinforce central command styles of governance this has been accompanied by further implementation failure, erosion of legitimacy and decline of civic values such as trust. The Putnam solution is to create political capacity by developing social capital. Thus the increased interest in collaborative mechanisms.

For some then, the main issue therefore is less one of democratic governance per se as whether traditional governance structures can cope with changing political, economic and social circumstances. Agranoff and McGuire (2001), for example, address this issue in conceptualizing the changing forms of interaction between federal, state and local levels in the United States as these relate to the delivery of policies such as urban economic development, health care and environmental protection. They argue that traditional models such as (a) top down federal control or (b) what they term “donor-recipient arrangements” (where policy may be implemented by bottom up negotiation and adjustment) are now mitigated by new forms of interaction that include “jurisdiction based” arrangements and network management. In the former, local managers (i.e., those with a specific jurisdiction) become the strategic hub of policy delivery activities. They manage interdependencies and seek to establish new organizational relationships for the purpose of achieving local goals. Thus, local civic entrepreneurs are the products of the devolved systems. In contrast, the network model is based on interdependency. Here leadership is collaborative and policies emerge as the consequence of collective action where solutions are sought that benefit all parties.

Agranoff and McGuire (2001) argue that network arrangements can be identified in many different policy areas and serve many different purposes. In particular they note their emergence in areas such as human services (often linked to the involvement of not-for-profit organizations), rural development (Radin et al. 1996) and local economic development (Agranoff and McGuire 1998c). But is any one format superior? Agranoff and McGuire’s (2001) conclusion would be that this is a misplaced question. They argue that the models operate in different combinations and that the form of these varies with circumstances. Hence, “emergent models do not replace longer standing models” (p. 678). Rather different types of interorganizational management emerge characterized by compliance (top down), two party bargaining (donor/recipient), local leadership (jurisdiction based) and collective strategy building (networks).

So if emergent “governance” models are increasing in importance, is government itself now “just another actor in this array of organizations?” (p. 679). If Agranoff and McGuire are reluctant to yield this point they are convinced that there is evidence that the relationships between government at federal, state and local levels and the wider universe of organizations (private, non profit, etc.) are becoming more asymmetrical involving com...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1. Collaborative Government and Evaluation: The Implications of a New Policy Instrument
• 2. Networks and Partnering Arrangements: New Challenges for Evaluation and Auditing
• 3. Quangos, Evaluation, and Accountability in Collaborative Government
• 4. The Politics of Evaluating Government Collaboration with the Third Sector
• 5. Collaborating for Public Service Quality: The Implications for Evaluation
• 6. Collaboration by Contract and Pooling Resources: The Implications for Evaluation
• 7. Results-Based Governance: Collaborating for Outcomes
• 8. Auditing and Evaluating Collaborative Government:
• 9. Evaluation, Accountability, and Collaboration
• 10. Evaluation and Collaborative Government: Lessons and Challenges
• Contributors
• Index