1.1 Introduction
This brief introduction sets out the definitions, concepts and methodology underpinning the chapters assembled in this volume.
Selection of Countries
The chapters of this book deal with some 20 countries representing a wide range of European (EU) member states (plus Switzerland and Iceland); they cover the west-east axis, including both western European (WE) countries and central eastern European (CEE) countries, and the north-south axis, from the Nordic to the Mediterranean countries. Besides being broadly representative, this spread of countries should be conducive to cross-country and cross-policy comparisons.
1.2 Selection of Sectors of Service Provision
The chapters assembled in this volume discuss institutional developments in the provision of public services and personal social services.
The term public services is used to refer to water supply, sewage treatment, waste management, public transport and energy provision (for the French administration’s legally derived notion of service public see Marcoum, Public service provision in France, in this volume). In English and in the British context, these services are usually referred to as public utilities; in France, they are services publics industriels et commerciaux; in Italy, servizi pubblici or servizi di pubblica utilità and in Germany, Daseinsvorsorge (‘provision of the necessaries of existence’). The EU introduced the term services of general economic interest (SGEI) to refer to this service sector (see European Commission 2011; see also Bauby and Similie 2014; Marcou, ‘The Impact of EU Law’, in this volume).
In contrast, personal social services and health services relate to individual social or health needs and in EU terminology, are referred to as social services of general interest (SSGI), a category which encompasses ‘health care, childcare, care for the elderly, assistance to disabled persons or social housing’ (see European Commission 2011: 2).
These two broad service sectors are usually treated separately in the literature, but the country chapters of this volume make a point of considering both sectors to facilitate a much more comprehensive analysis and thus, yield new empirical and theoretical insights.
1.3 Institutional Approach
Within political science, distinctions are drawn between polity, politics and policy. The term policy refers to the content and results of political decision-making, politics to the processes and conflicts surrounding political decision-making and polity to the institutional/organisational structure and context in which policies are decided and implemented.
The chapters of this book take an institutionalist perspective to focus on the polity, that is, on service provision at the institutional level, first on the subnational/local level.
Variance in the Institutions Involved in Public and Social Services Provision
A kind of taxonomy (and “glossary”) of the institutions involved in service provision is given here to encourage the use of common terminology throughout the book. Whilst this attempt to construct a lingua franca may entail some loss in the substantive and cognitive differentiation and subtlety inherent in country-specific terms, it should improve readability and facilitate comparisons between countries.
- Public sector—used as a generic term—comprises the state, subnational and, in particular, municipal sectors. Where public and social services are delivered directly by public sector’s (particularly municipal sector) administrative units and personnel, one can also refer to in-house delivery or provision of services.
- The sometimes monolithic public sector may be disaggregated and decentralised at the organisational level by (horizontally) hiving off administrative units. Drawing on the principal agent theory and vocabulary, this process may also be termed agentification or agencification (see Van Thiel 2012; Torsteinsen and van Genutsen 2016). 1
- The model of service provision that organisationally distances and disaggregates service provision from core administrative functions of the responsible public sector body, whilst ensuring that this body remains legally responsible and that services are under the aegis of an elected council and/or chief executive is called régie or régie directe (in France), muncipalizzate (in Italy), Eigenbetriebe (in Germany) or direct labour organisation (in the UK) (see Marcou, ‘The Impact of EU Law’, in this volume; Grossi et al. 2010, especially Table 10.1). In the terminology of principal agent theory, one might refer to internal agentification (see Torsteinsen and van Genutsen 2016).
- The term corporatisation (see Grossi and Reichard in this volume) has come to be widely used (also in most chapters of this volume) to describe horizontal organisational decentralisation which is directed at the creation of legally independent (private law- or public law-based) organisations or enterprises with managerial autonomy. When corporatisation is based on private law, the corporatised units are usually organised as limited companies or stock companies; public law-based corporatisation (Eigengesellschaften in Germany) makes it easier for private investors to acquire minority or majority shares in the corporation and thus, form mixed (public-private) companies and can be used to promote asset privatisation (see below). The term municipally owned enterprises (MOEs) has also gained widespread currency as well. 2 In the terminology of principal agent theory, corporatisation may also be referred to as external agentification. 3
- Municipalities (and/or other public authorities) may establish inter-municipal/inter-organisational companies (sometimes legally independent) for the purpose of collaborative service provision.
- Mixed companies combine public (municipal) and private ownership. 4 A variant of the mixed company which has recently gained prominence is the organisational public-private partnership (PPP) which is made up of public/municipal and private shareholders and can be distinguished from contractual PPPs in which the organisation remains in public (municipal) ownership and the involvement of private investors is based on often complicated contractual arrangements. In a contractual PPP, a municipality solicits private finance for an infrastructure project and in many cases, private sector companies will also build the facilities and operate the relevant services (see Grossi and Reichard in this volume).
- The not-for-profit or third sector is essentially made up of non-public, usually non-profit-making organisations (sometimes referred to as non-governmental organisations, NGOs) that have salaried staff although they depend mainly on voluntary, unpaid labour. Some of these organisations receive significant public funding and thus, in practice, function as quasi-public organisations.
- Overlapping with the formally organised third sector is an ‘informal’ sector (see Munday 2000: 268) made up of societal and civic groups such as charities, self-help groups, family and neighbourhood networks which do not usually have a formal institutional structure and whose workers are normally unpaid.
- Outsourcing (contracting out) of public functions or services is a term used to denote the transfer of responsibility for delivery of public and social services from a public/municipal authority to an outside provider (which may be public, semi-public, private or non-public and non-profit-making). Outsourcing is usually based on a competitive procedure based on the awarding of a (usually time-limited) concession contract. In France, outsourcing (gestion déléguée, which includes recent variants) has traditionally been a core strategy for municipal service provision (see Marcou, Public service provision in France, in this volume). Outsourcing may also be referred to as functional privatisation (see Kuhlmann and Wollmann 2014: 189), but to avoid terminological confusion, it seems best to eschew the term privatisation in this context, restricting its use to material privatisation (see below).
- Material or asset privatisation occurs when public (state or municipal) assets are sold to priva...