Local Public Services in European Countries: Main Results of a Research Project by Ciriec International

Abstract

The present article is meant as an introduction to the three contributions on local public transport, water services and waste management resulting from a research of CIRIEC International Scientific Commission on ‘Public Services/Public Enterprises’, launched in 2008. The main purpose of the research was to produce a cross section description of essential and widely used local public services in different countries and to investigate their evolution over the last two or three decades. We give here a transversal overview of general common trends in the three analyzed sectors. We explain the increasing autonomy and separation of decision levels in planning and governance processes, describe the changing role and nature of the provider of public services, depict some peculiarities of the structure and the process of regulation, and deal finally with some remarks on funding policies. We show that unquestionably EU directives and regulations did have a definite impact on the way the services were supplied; however this has not produced a prevailing ‘European model’ in all member States. Our research shows clearly that as of now the EU area offers very different models of local public services. The variety of solutions adopted is impressive. Each concrete choice regarding regulation, market governance, planning and provision depends in the end on a negotiation between the central state, local authorities, bureaucracy, trade unions, pressure groups such as private enterprises and users of the service. The existence of different solutions adopted by different countries and within the same sector could mean that a compulsory policy towards a uniform solution, as frequently favoured by the EU, is not convincing and should not be supported. Since there is no evidence that the different solutions produce different degrees of efficiency and effectiveness, they could represent appropriate forms of adaptation to national overall characteristics and changing citizens’ needs.

Corporate governance and democratic accountability: local state-owned enterprises in Norway

“…Furthermore, scaling back direct state intervention in the SOE's running affairs was in line with the much-cited slogan 'Let the managers manage' a key tenet of NPM (Aucoin 1990;Kettl 1997). The intention was to increase efficiency by insulating operational decisions from political interference (Bognetti and Obermann 2012;Zatti 2012).…”

“…The empirical context of the present study is SOEs in the local government sector. SOEs have become a prominent feature of local government service provisions in several European countries (Warner and Hebdon 2001;Kuhlmann 2008;Bognetti and Obermann 2012;Citroni et al 2013;Wollmann et al 2016). The "demise of in-house production" (Denters and Rose 2005) and the ensuing "corporatisation" of the local government sector (Teles 2015) have proceeded markedly, not least in Norway (Aarsaether and Vabo 2002;Gjertsen and Martiniussen 2006;Aars and Ringkjøb 2011;Bjørnsen et al 2015).…”

Yes, No, Maybe: The Ambiguous Relationships Between State‐owned Enterprises and the State

“…Such liberalization had several origins. As Bognetti and Obermann () reported, the corresponding reasons included growing public deficits, the desire for more efficiency in the public sector, and the belief that the private sector was superior in terms of efficiency (e.g., Megginson et al. ).…”

“…The results of liberalization have been described as mixed (Florio , Bognetti and Obermann , Clifton et al. ).…”

“…() conducted a meta‐analysis about water and waste collection in municipalities and found no genuine empirical effect of cost savings resulting from private production. As Bognetti and Obermann () noted, superiority of either private or public production has often been discussed ideologically, rather than proven scientifically. In retrospect, the approach to liberalization in the 1980s was probably too simplistic (see also Clifton et al.…”