IMPACT OF DECENTRALIZATION REFORMS IN PAKISTAN ON SERVICE DELIVERY—AN EMPIRICAL STUDY

By bringing decision making closer to people, decentralization is expected to improve governance and service delivery outcomes. Yet, the empirical evidence on the impact of decentralization on macroeconomic performance and public sector size presents a mixed picture. However, the findings of cross‐country studies in the literature are sensitive to the way decentralization is defined, and how its extent and impact are measured. This article avoids the unwanted effects of incomparability and aggregation in cross‐country analysis. We use a unique panel data set from 183 villages in Pakistan to analyze the impact of decentralization reforms implemented in 2001 on the provision of services—street paving, construction of water canals, sanitation sewer lines, and school facilities. Our results show that the magnitude of provision of all services increased significantly following decentralization reforms. We further show that the four services are impacted differently and service delivery improvement is not uniform, but not in ways that conform to the hypotheses of patronage theory. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Temporary Staff,Contractors, and Volunteers: The Hidden Workforce in Victorian Local Government

Theories of strategic Human Resource Management (HRM) emphasise the need to understand and effectively manage the workforce, and to align HRM practices with organisational strategy. Local government in Victoria was radically revised in 1993–94 with forced amalgamations, and later the introduction of Best Value Principles. Alongside this have been changes to council workforces. This article explores the composition of these workforces, and seeks to understand if strategic HRM practices underpin their management. It reports that in addition to the ‘known’ and ‘managed’ internal workforce, many councils have an external workforce which includes temporary staff, independent contractors, those working for external contractors, volunteers, work placement students and trainees. There is little evidence that theories of strategic HRM have been used to produce workforce planning strategies and policies relating to these staff, or that their management has been strategically aligned and reviewed to align with council strategies and business plans.     

Bypassing public procurement regulation: A study of rationality in local decisionmaking

Using private contractors through procurement is common in most public sector areas. Despite the benefits of procurement, officials are sometimes tempted to circumvent procurement regulations. The aim of this article is to examine the strategies used by local governmental decisionmakers to bypass procurement regulations and to analyze the rationality underlying these officials' actions. Interviews, court documents, municipal documents, and newspaper articles describing the actions of Swedish municipal officials concerning special transport service (STS) procurements were collected and analyzed. In a case in which rural municipalities lost regular taxi services after STS procurement, we demonstrate how decisions were driven by pressure from the public and local interest groups, making municipal officials deviate from procurement regulations in striving to secure the existence of regular taxi services. One outcome was that local businesses were given preferential treatment, violating regulations and reducing economic efficiency.     

地方政府合作中的利益博弈和机制创新

中国区域经济的发展需要地方政府紧密合作,但地方政府间利益冲突使得合作过程产生了不确定性并导致一系列问题。本文在博弈理论的框架下对这些问题进行了系统分析并进而研究其解决机制。     

新时期地方政府网络舆情危机及其控制探析

在我国经济社会发展处于矛盾凸显期和网络社会迅速纵深发展的时代背景下,准确把握正确应对各类政府网络舆情危机,具有十分重要的战略意义。     

地方政府绩效评估中公众参与问题研究

目前我国许多地方政府在其绩效评估中,评估主体、评估信息呈现出实质性的政府垄断,公众参与形同虚设,流于形式。因此,调整评估主体,使其组成多元化;发展电子政务,创新政府绩效信息提供方式,促进信息公开化以及重视和提高公众参与政府绩效评估的能力实属当务之急。     

中美省、州级政府间应急管理协作比较研究--以“泛珠三角”和 EMAC 为例

当前，各类突发事件呈现出跨部门、跨区域的特点，由单一部门或地方政府来应对如此复杂的突发事件显然非常困难，因此应当破除传统“行政区行政”的治理理念，采取区域协同合作行为，发挥自身的优势，借助相互的资源，共同抵御灾难。我国应急管理政府间合作主要集中在省级政府，因此建立健全省级政府应急管理协作机制具有重要意义。通过比较研究我国的《泛珠三角区域内地九省（区）应急管理合作协议》与美国的《州际应急管理互助协议》（EMAC）在体制、法制和机制三个方面的差异，发现我国省级政府的应急管理行政合作协议存在缺乏独立权威的协调管理机构、缺乏法律保障和法律权威、跨区域应急预案体系与灾后补偿机制亟需完善、人才队伍建设任重道远等问题，要借鉴 EMAC 的先进经验，结合现实国情完善我国省级政府间应急管理协同合作。     

‘The Root Is Maya,the Practice Is Pluralist’: Xel‐jú and Indigenous Political Mobilisation in Quetzaltenango,Guatemala

Since the 1990s Latin America has witnessed the emergence of ethnic, often social movement‐based, political parties. Within this context Rigoberto Quemé Chay became the first indigenous mayor of Quetzaltenango, the second‐largest city of Guatemala, a place that until then had been marked by indigenous political exclusion and racism. This article seeks to explain why Quemé was victorious in 1995 and also why he subsequently lost the election in 2004 through an analysis of the ideational struggle within the (indigenous) political organisation, Xel‐jú, which backed Quemé's candidacy twice. I use the movements of ‘departure’, ‘manoeuvre’ and ‘arrival’ in the process of the constitution of hegemonic visions of power to analyse Xel‐jú's rise to political power.     

The limits of local citizenship: administrative borders within the Italian municipalities

This article explores residency, a form of municipal membership that plays a strategic role in Italy. Residency is a formal status and a means to have access to rights. Therefore, it is a sort of local citizenship that, at least in part, equalises citizens and non-citizens. Due to its strategic role, many local authorities have paid serious attention to it recently. Municipalities have illegally tightened the requirements provided for by national laws for obtaining the status of resident or introduced new requirements. Stressing the different mechanisms of exclusion from residency, this article explains that they often work as administrative borders. These are bureaucratic barriers that, by denying residency, aspire to regulate, symbolically and sometimes materially, the composition of the people living within municipal territories and to redistribute rights between ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ individuals. As such, administrative borders fragment individual statuses and provoke an increase in civic stratification.     

Does intermunicipal cooperation increase efficiency? A conditional metafrontier approach for the Hessian wastewater sector

ABSTRACT

This paper analyses the relationship between intermunicipal cooperation and efficiency of public service provision. Organisational arrangements of public service production, including self-provision, joint provision or contracting, affect incentives and internal transaction costs. Hence, cooperation gains from scale effects need to be balanced against technical inefficiencies. We analyse relative efficiency of wastewater disposal for German municipalities. We employ a conditional analysis in conjunction with a metafrontier approach to calculate relative efficiency measures and technology gap ratios controlling for organisational arrangements and further environmental variables. Jointly providing municipalities and contractor municipalities exhibit lower technical efficiency than self-providing and contracting municipalities. As confirmed by previous research, scale effects from cooperation and contracting apply to small municipalities primarily.