Schools and public buildings in decay: the role of political fragmentation

Borge, Lars–Erik; Hopland, Arnt O.

doi:10.1007/s10101-016-0187-z

Cited by 16 publications

(31 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…When comparing the reported building conditions in the 167 local governments that participated both in the 2004 and 2016 surveys, we see that building conditions appear to have improved slightly. Similar as Borge and Hopland (2017), we find that both political and fiscal determinants are important for building conditions.…”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 75%

Building conditions in Norwegian local governments: trends and determinants

Hopland

Kvamsdal

2019

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In light of evidence of low levels of maintenance of public buildings, we investigate trends and determinants of public building conditions in Norwegian local governments. On average, the condition of Norwegian local public facilities have improved slightly in the period 2004-2016. Survey data suggest substantial fluctuations in building conditions and a negative relationship between building conditions in 2004 and 2016. A driver behind this result is high investments in local governments with poor building conditions in 2004. Further, we find no systematic relationship between the conditions in 2004 and maintenance expenditures in subsequent years. We conclude that if maintenance levels are too low, investment levels may be too high. Generally, our results hint at an unhealthy balance between maintenance spending and public spending. Finally, we find that both political and fiscal factors are important in explaining building conditions.

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Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 75%

Building conditions in Norwegian local governments: trends and determinants

Hopland

Kvamsdal

2019

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“…These results suggest that the facility managers must get high-quality information from the units and be highly competent to convince fragmented local councils to allocate sufficient resources to facilities management. This is consistent with the findings that fragmented local councils systematically give maintenance low priority (Borge and Hopland, 2017;Hopland and Kvamsdal, 2018a).…”

Section: Jfm 175supporting

confidence: 92%

“…Local government purpose buildings are important for the production of welfare services, and it is expensive to build and maintain them. Even in affluent countries such as Norway, many local governments do not maintain their buildings sufficiently to maintain a good technical condition (Borge and Hopland, 2012;Borge and Hopland, 2017;Hopland and Kvamsdal, 2018a).…”

Section: Maintenance Of Local Public Buildingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Critical success factors for maintenance of local public buildings

Hopland

Kvamsdal

2019

JFM

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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate a survey on critical success factor for the maintenance of local public buildings and how reported score values and factor rankings depend on characteristics (contingencies) of the local governments that participated. Design/methodology/approach The authors use data from a large-scale survey of Norwegian local governments that covered 66 per cent of all local governments and 80 per cent of the population. The authors combine these data with contingent information from public registers on demographics, fiscal, political and geographical characteristics. The authors run regressions to determine whether contingencies affect survey results. They further study how score values vary with a key contingent factor. Findings The main result of this paper is that the reported importance of critical success factors is contingent on local government population levels. A comparison of importance rankings based on population quartiles shows that ranking orders change, both between quartiles and from the overall ranking, and that certain factors show systematic changes. Further, the authors find that when controlling for sampling error, groups of factors should be considered as equally important. This result holds both for the full sample ranking and for rankings within population quartiles. Originality/value The results of this paper have implications for all survey-based investigations of critical success factors where contingent information on respondents are available. Contingencies need to be taken into consideration, both when assessing rankings according to some criteria and when comparing actual score values.

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“…Borge and Hopland (2017) andHopland and Kvamsdal (2019) document that poor condition of public buildings, including schools is an important concern in Norwegian local governments.5 Hopland and Nyhus (2016) find a positive correlation between satisfaction with school facilities and self-reported effort-level in school. This can potentially partly explain the positive effect from building conditions on student outcomes.Journal of Facility Management Education and Research, 3(1):1-7…”

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confidence: 99%

On the difficulties of evaluating the effect of school facility conditions on student outcomes

Hopland¹

2019

Journal of Facility Management Education and Research

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This paper presents various empirical strategies used to analyze the effect from school facilities on student outcomes, and discusses strengths and weaknesses by the methods. A key challenge in studies of student outcomes is that outcomes are affected by many factors and that many of these factors are correlated with each other. Moreover, some factors are difficult to measure, and cannot be observed in data. Hence, it is difficult to avoid problems related to omitted variables bias and the estimated correlations can thus often not be interpreted as causal effects. It is important to be aware of how difficult it is to move on from a correlation to a causal effect. If researchers wrongfully draw causal inferences one risks misleading policy makers into allocating resources to the wrong factors.

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Schools and public buildings in decay: the role of political fragmentation

Cited by 16 publications

References 21 publications

Building conditions in Norwegian local governments: trends and determinants

Building conditions in Norwegian local governments: trends and determinants

Critical success factors for maintenance of local public buildings

On the difficulties of evaluating the effect of school facility conditions on student outcomes

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