The European Benchmark of Local Public Services
France’s recent reforms concerning territorial governance have set in motion a host of simultaneous projects requiring the reorganization of local authorities – a task made even more complex by the fact that relationships between different authorities are also impacted. Nonetheless, local authority chief executives see these reforms as a powerful engine for progress.
Human resources at large local authorities is an immense field in which issues of cost (or value?), efficiency, skills and quality of public service intersect. Finding the right management system is crucial but difficult to master in the framework of regional civil service.
Innovation and funding, two topics that are related in many ways. Administrations are innovating to simplify administrative procedures provided that the cost of the public service is also substantially reduced. For communities facing increasing financial pressure, innovating means imagining new revenue, reducing costs, or moving towards new sources of funding.
Time management is central to the reorganization process. It goes hand in hand with agent empowerment, without which a new shared culture is very difficult to instill. At the same time, citizen participation is becoming truly decisive and calls for profound changes in approach and method.
Territorial organization reforms in France herald profound changes with effects that are still difficult to evaluate. This uncertainty shouldn’t prevent us from thinking about the effectiveness of truly citizen-centric public services. Territorial marketing generates interesting links between identity, cooperation and networks.
The topic of this fifth meeting led to discussions on the interplay of power at various levels. Participants shared their experiences of the difficulty in achieving a collective appropriation of the concept of a metropolitan area and compared their results in terms of regionalizing public policies and pooling services.
Six concrete cases, the United Kingdom model and an analysis of the French context by LATTS Institute inspired many comments on the notions of partnership, power and public service. The difficulties encountered with PPPs, inherent in risk sharing, have dampened interest in this type of arrangement, but other innovative forms of cooperation should be promoted.
