Public Sector Reform in Australia: An Evaluation of the Corporatisation of Sydney Water, 1995 to 2002

The corporatisation of Sydney Water from 1995 onwards formed part of a much broader process of public sector reform in Australia. However, Sydney Water represents an unusual case study of corporatisation since it has embodied two distinct forms of corporate structure over the period 1995 to 2002; both the company model and the statutory model. This article seeks to evaluate the success or otherwise of this corporatisation process using ‘internal’ measures of the performance appraisals undertaken by ‘outside’ bodies in six main forums: The independent assessments against operating licence conditions; NSW government's annual assessments of government businesses performance; Sydney Water's own performance measurement against corporate business plans; water reform measures stipulated by the Council of Australian Governments; industry financial performance indicators as measured by the Water Services Association of Australia; and an international assessment conducted by the UK Office of Water Services.     

VALUE TRADE-OFFS AND PRODUCTIVITY: THE TRANSPOLITICIZATION OF THE U.S. POSTAL SERVICE

The political values in the American public sector are presented through the case of the postal system and i t s reorganization In 1971. This change (from the Post Office Department to the United States Postal Service) reflected an attempt to '8depoliticize11 and professlonalize postal operations. The article suggests that the results have been the TRANSpoliticization of the postal system to a corporate model of behavior and political influence, and have led to the limitation of any broadly considered public role. This i s evident in the consideration of employment and the emphasis on productivity. The corporate model undermines the public nature of the post office, and the connection between postal service and public benefits.     

A Policy Outcomes Comparison: Does SIB Market Discipline Narrow Social Rights?

Abstract

This article argues that the outcomes-based management schemes in social impact bonds (SIBs) simplify social impact and often ignore the complex ecosystem of more powerful actors that contribute to social problems. Using human ecological theory, it focuses on early care and education SIBs across the OECD to show how the focus on clients and metrics at the micro scale fails to achieve broad outcomes and may even narrow social rights. By contrast, SIBs that focus on meso- and macro-level actors have more opportunity to effect systemic change and broaden social rights. However, SIBs are rarely focused on powerful private market actors.     

The Use of Contracting in the Public Sector

Around the world and especially in English-speaking countries there has been a wave of contract-based public sector management following on the heels of a wave of corporatisation and privatisation.     

Policy Change,Policy Feedback,and Interest Mobilization: The Politics of Nuclear Waste Management

Many of the leading theories of the policy process are aimed at providing insights into the factors that make policy change more (or less) likely. In general, policy change is seen as a result of shifting dynamics within policy subsystems. However, building on theories of policy feedback and interest mobilization, this article examines whether policy change, apart from being an effect of subsystem dynamics, can be a cause of shifting dynamics as latent actors are motivated to participate in the subsystem as a result of policy change. Two hypotheses regarding post‐policy change mobilization are developed and tested using data on participation in congressional hearings concerning the management of nuclear waste. The findings suggest that policy change can activate latent policy actors, specifically those actors that view themselves as “losing” as a result of the policy change. These results point to the need for scholars to examine the potential impacts of post‐policy change dynamics on policy development.     

Corporatisation and Community Service Obligations: Are They Incompatible?

This article asks whether corporatisation is compatible with the notion of community service obligations (CSOs). Corporatisation provides only a minimal framework for the identification of social objectives as CSOs and their funding by government from budget. The community has certain expectations of utilities in relation to CSOs, which may be different from expectations held by governments. Models of corporatisation which have two shareholding ministers with competing objectives introduce a further potential source of conflict.
Historically, the characteristics of a CSO are ambiguous (IC 1991:81) and this presents difficulty in their costing and identification. Governments and corporatised entities have attempted to clarify the issues of definition, identification and costing. These and other issues such as transparency, budget funding, coverage, jurisdiction, public interest and community spirit are discussed in the context of corporatised government electricity utilities.     

Federal Intervention in the Management of Groundwater Resources: Past Efforts and Future Prospects

The role of the federal government in groundwater regulationis likely to increase over the next few decades. A combinationof events—including recent federal court decisions, pastfederal intervention in state groundwater utilization, the publicpronouncements by a variety of federal actors, and increasingconcern over the inability of states to control overdrafting—allsuggest that the federal role in groundwater management maybe increasing. These events are examined here, and it is arguedthat, without change in state groundwater management practicesto mitigate the negative effects of state competition for groundwater,federal intervention in groundwater management seems likely.     

Shaping the Scope of Conflict in Scotland’s Fracking Debate: Conflict Management and the Narrative Policy Framework

This study applies a narrative lens to policy actors’ discursive strategies in the Scottish debate over fracking. Based on a sample of 226 newspaper articles (2011–2017) and drawing on key elements of the narrative policy framework (NPF), the research examines how policy coalitions have characterized their supporters, their opponents, and the main regulator (Scottish government). It also explores how actors have sought to expand or contain the scope of conflict to favor their policy objectives. Empirically, only the government strives for conflict containment, whereas both pro‐ and anti‐fracking groups prioritize conflict expansion through characterization contests and the diffusion and concentration of the costs/risks and benefits of fracking. In theoretical terms, the study proposes that Sarah Pralle’s conflict management model, which emphasizes symmetrical strategies of conflict expansion by both coalitions, is a potential tool to revise extant NPF expectations about the different narrative strategies of winning and losing coalitions. Moreover, the fact that policy actors mostly employ negatively rather than positively framed characters in their narratives may be a valid expectation for similar policy conflicts, particularly under conditions of regulatory uncertainty.     

Policy Entrepreneurs,Issue Experts,and Water Rights Policy Change in Colorado

Policy entrepreneurs can influence policy changes and decisions. These people invest their time, knowledge, and skills into promoting policies with which they agree. This paper investigates the influence that entrepreneurs had in the case of recreational water rights policy in Colorado to build a model of policy entrepreneurship. Almost 20 Colorado communities have constructed white‐water kayak courses to boost their local economies. In twelve of these communities, construction was followed by community pursuit of a new form of water right—the recreational in‐channel diversion. This case study is relevant to many areas of environmental policy and management where policies are transitioning from traditional consumptive uses of the resource to nonconsumptive uses. This policy change was not a given in Colorado communities, with recreational water rights requiring significant investments of community resources. These research findings conclude that policy entrepreneurs were influential to policy change, but the most important actors were expert entrepreneurs who hold expertise in water resource matters.     

Institutional Dynamics in Environmental Corporatism: The Impact of Market and Technological Change on the Dutch Polder Model

This article describes how market and technological change can be conceived to affect corporatist politics in the area of waste management. The article adopts a political economy approach to institutional change, and seeks to trace the impact of market and technological change on established political and regulatory institutions. The article demonstrates that the main impact of marketization of waste services and the introduction of ISO 14001 environmental management systems was to expand the range of choices for companies and regulators to engage in regulatory interaction concerning environmental waste management practices. The main purpose of the article is to demonstrate exactly how the emergence of regulatory choices for both companies and regulators is likely to open up new avenues for regulation in the environmental field that, once pursued, systematically reduce incentives for corporate and regulatory actors to engage in associational politics.     

Legitimation as justification: Foregrounding public philosophies in explanations of gradual ideational change

In accounts of institutional change, discursive institutionalists point to the role of economic and political ideas in upending institutional stability and providing the raw material for the establishment of a new institutional setup. This approach has typically entailed a conceptualisation of ideas as coherent and monolithic and actors as almost automatically following the precepts of the ideas they hold and support. Recent theorising stresses how ideas are in fact composite and heterogeneous, and actors pragmatic and strategic in how they employ ideas in political struggles. However, this change of focus has, until recently, not included how foundational ideas of a polity, often referred to as ‘public philosophies’, are theorised to impact on institution-building. Drawing on French Pragmatic Sociology, and taking as a starting point recent efforts within discursive institutionalism to conceptualise the dynamic nature of public philosophies, this article seeks to foreground moral justification in accounts of ideational and institutional change. It suggests that public philosophies are reflexively used by actors in continual processes of normative justification that may produce significant policy shifts over time. The empirical relevance of the argument is demonstrated through an analysis of gradual ideational and institutional change in French labour market policy, specifically the development from the state-guaranteed minimum income scheme of 1988 to the neoliberal make-work-pay logic of the 2009 scheme, Revenu de solidarité active. The analysis shows that public and moral justifications have underpinned and gradually shaped these radical changes.     

Effective Corporatisation Legislation: The Fundamental Issue in Port Management

It is now some seven years since the restructure of Australian ports and their transformation into corporatised entities. This strategy was adopted in an endeavour to improve efficiency by distancing government from day to day operations - that element that was perceived to be the cause of sub-optimal performance. While there is widespread agreement that port performance has improved significantly, dissatisfaction persists and the belief that continued political intervention is preventing ports' commercial potential from being realised. This paper investigates these issues but argues that political intervention per se should not be the focus of research as the fundamental cause of sub-optimal performance. Rather political intervention is an effect of a more fundamental problem — an inappropriate legislative framework — and the focus of research should be on the legislation and corporatisation model in which political intervention is mandatory.     

We All Need Help: “Big Data” and the Mismeasure of Public Administration

Rapid advances in our ability to collect, analyze, and disseminate information are transforming public administration. This “big data” revolution presents opportunities for improving the management of public programs, but it also entails some risks. In addition to potentially magnifying well‐known problems with public sector performance management—particularly the problem of goal displacement—the widespread dissemination of administrative data and performance information increasingly enables external political actors to peer into and evaluate the administration of public programs. The latter trend is consequential because external actors may have little sense of the validity of performance metrics and little understanding of the policy priorities they capture. The author illustrates these potential problems using recent research on U.S. primary and secondary education and suggests that public administration scholars could help improve governance in the data‐rich future by informing the development and dissemination of organizational report cards that better capture the value that public agencies deliver.     

Europeanisation of a Non-EU Country: The Case of Swiss Immigration Policy

Although studies of the influence of Europeanisation on domestic politics and institutions are numerous, a consistent and systematic analytical framework is still lacking. This article tries to overcome this weakness and presents a comprehensive framework that examines the conditions under which Europeanisation is likely to lead to national adaptation. We identify three main independent variables, including domestic power configurations, mediating domestic institutions, and actors' strategies. This model is applied to the agreement on the free movement of persons between Switzerland and the European Union. Our results suggest that it is not the number of veto points as such that matters most, but the strength of the actors that activate them or threaten to do so, and the counter-strategies available to actors favouring change.     

城市社区管理体制改革的发展瓶颈与路径选择——以北京“鲁谷模式”为例

街道办事处作为城市管理体制架构中的重要一环,其制度规定和实际职能在社会发展、时代变迁中面临着改革。北京鲁谷社区在街道层面进行全方位的体制改革,由街道制变为社区制。然而,此项改革却在实践过程中面临发展瓶颈。鉴于此,有必要提出我国城市社区管理体制改革的路径选择。     

Nuclear Terrorism: Actor-based Threat Assessment

The assumption that policies reducing the proliferation of fissile materials will automatically reduce the threat of nuclear terrorism is fallacious. Even if moderately successful, anti-proliferation initiatives have a limited impact on the illegal flow of nuclear materials and are not likely to prevent the acquisition of nuclear materials by non-state actors. Current policies focus on the containment of fissile materials rather than on non-state-actors that may wish to acquire them. Concentrating principally on management, accounting, storage and transfer procedures, policy-makers seem to ignore the fact that the primary threat of nuclear terrorism stems not from the availability of the materials but from the potential willingness of some groups to acquire them. This article attempts to shift the focus of discussion from state-centric models of analysis to a threat or actor-based model of analysis. In doing so, the article seeks to identify risk factors, which in combination may indicate a willingness by non-state actors to acquire nuclear weapons. In addition it hopes to provide the basis for more effective threat assessments.     

Transitions in Defense Management Reform: A Review of the Government Accountability Office’s Chief Management Officer Recommendation and Comments for the New Administration

The Government Accountability Office believes the answer to the U.S. Defense Department’s persistent management problems is to be found in the creation of a new position, chief management officer, to oversee defense business transformation. The recommendation for this position is reviewed and used to raise questions and spur inquiry in the areas of evidence‐based reform, the relationship between policy and administration, auditor overreach, and sustaining reforms through transition. The latter portion is expanded in this time of transition, and recommendations are made to the new administration to develop a management agenda, to the defense career executives to facilitate the transition, and to the next comptroller general to consider how the Government Accountability Office’s varied roles produce outputs that align with the desired outcomes in both the policy and administration domains.     

Conflict and Collaboration in Wildfire Management: The Role of Mission Alignment

Responding to large wildfires requires actors from multiple jurisdictions and multiple levels of government to work collaboratively. The missions and objectives of federal agencies often differ from those of state land management agencies as well as local wildfire response agencies regarding land use and wildfire management. As wildfire size and intensity increase over time and associated annual suppression costs range between $2 billion and $3 billion, learning more about the existence and management of perceived agency differences becomes imperative within the academic and practitioner communities. This article examines the extent to which perceived mission misalignment exists among federal, state, and local actors and how well those differences are managed. Findings provide quantitative evidence that mission misalignment is greater within intergovernmental relationships than within intragovernmental relationships. Additionally, findings speak to the larger conversation around intergovernmental relationships within the federal structure and perceptions of the presence and management of potential interagency conflict.

Practitioner Points

• Potential conflict between the missions of federal and state land agencies presents a challenge for disaster management, and differing governmental levels and land‐use mandates may highlight relationships where tensions are likely greater.
• Wildfire managers may need to more proactively address relationships among federal agencies and state and local partners rather than relationships among multiple federal agencies.
• Wildfire management may benefit from increased awareness of—and discussion around—partner agencies’ stated land management philosophies and legal mandates, as structural frameworks, such as the Incident Command Structure, may not alone lead to conflict‐free collaboration.

     

When Missions Matter: Professional Priorities and the “Stepchild” of Supervisory Programs

If there is a clear bottom line to the literature on political control of the bureaucracy, it is that control is never complete. Principals can be multiple, priorities diverse, preferences for policy incomplete and not articulated, and intentional choice lost in the muddle. Yet as long as bureaucratic studies remain focused upon outside political actors, or at best, the political appointee at the helm of an agency, we will not make many advances in our understanding of important organizational dynamics that act as an independent force upon the phenomenon of bureaucratic behavior. This article suggests a politically cognizant return to the bureaucracy by examining the distinct management efforts of the Fed, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and the FDIC to supervise the consumer and civil rights obligations of banks, known collectively as “compliance” obligations. The same mandates, issued and overseen by the same political principals, and implemented within common professional cultures, have been managed in ways that vary in the context of each agency's organizational mission. It is argued that organizational mission provides an empirical link between the priorities and mandates imposed from a system of “overhead democracy,” and the influential priorities of a common professional group (bank examiners) in each of the agencies.