Joined-Up Service Provision in Hungarian Local Governments: The Case of Shared IT Service Centers

1 Introduction. Overall objectives The late 1980’s and, especially, the 1990’s were characterized by an unquestioned dominance of New Public Management (NPM) discourse. National governments and international/supranational bodies (the latter including the OECD, the IFIs, and various EU bodies) unequivocally advocated, and claimed to accept and follow, the problem statements, diagnoses, normative stances and practical recipes offered by NPM. Likewise, the academic discourse around public administration reform (PAR) was almost entirely focused on reflections to NPM. NPM as a field of ‘practice wisdom’ involved, firstly, a view of the ‘Old Public Administration’ (that is, pre-NPM state of affairs) characterized by large, integrated, rigid and inefficient public bureaucracies. Secondly, the instruments and solutions for these problems involved reliance on such measures as - the breaking-up of large, integrated bureaucracies; - the introduction of purchaser-provider split in public services; - increasing reliance on contract-type relationship between ‘purchasers’ (such as local governments) and ‘providers’ (public, semi-public, commercial and NGO service organization); - in particular, an oftentimes radical broadening of contracting-out of the broadest range of public services to private providers by means of competitive tendering; - privatization of formerly public assets (and a parallel elimination of public responsibility for the provision of the associated public services) in diverse areas such as social housing, and local and regional public utilities From the late 1990’s and early 2000’s many European as well as other developed countries witnessed a change in both how key problems confronted by reformers of public administration were seen, as well as what kinds of solutions were put forward to fight those problems. The (perceived) ‘sharpness’ of this turn was – and is – strongly varying both in time and space, ranging from a slight modification of the main thrust of reform (with an implicit acknowledgement of the merits of previous NPM reforms) to a harsh rejection of, and across-the-board U-turn in, NPM type reforms. This (apparently) new trend was even less coherent than NPM not only how it perceived the key problems but also what solutions it put forward. These solutions involved a diverse mix of such measures as - increasing horizontal coordination between autonomous governmental actors (both in policy formulation and service provision); - structural integration of formerly autonomous governmental actors (both in policy formulation and service provision) in order to ensure tight coordination; - strengthening of governmental capacity and role both in policy formulation and in service provision (including ‘insourcing’ and ‘re-nationalizing’ functions). These trends were substantially strengthened by such external factors as security threats (e.g. 9/11) and the financial and economic crisis unfolding from 2008 onwards. These reforms (and their doctrinal foundations) have been called, varyingly in space and time, joined-up government (JUG), whole-of-government (WoG) and post-NPM reforms. For the sake of terminological simplicity we will refer to them as JUG. The overall objective of the research is to examine how JUG reforms unfold in Hungary’s local government arena, what factors drive or promote them, and what effect – intended or unintended – they bring about. Over the past five years Hungary witnessed an almost shocking wave of centrally initiated, top-down reforms of its subnational (territorial as well as local) governance institutions and processes. These reforms fundamentally restricted local governmental responsibilities and capacities as well as the constitutional and political framework in which local governments operate. Understandably, such – in comparison with these wholesale changes: rather technical – aspects of reforms as those related to JUG appeared marginally, if at all, in recent scholarship. The resulting lack of information and systematized knowledge serves as a prime empirical justification of our research. From a more theoretical perspective the extremely centralist and etatist (and, possibly, illiberal) ‘reform context’ of Hungary’s JUG reforms pose serious questions regarding the limits and transferability of JUG principles and JUG techniques both in terms of how and why they happen and what outcomes they deliver. 2 Research questions, data collection and data analysis The empirical focus of the study is one particular JUG initivative, the so-called ASP (Application Service Provider) centers providing shared ICT services for local governments. By examining this JUG measure we wish to answer the following research questions: 1. How do the JUG initiatives unfold in a local government setting? What implications do they have on key aspects of local governments such as policy formulation, service provision, and politico-administrative relations? In particular, do JUG measures ‘deliver’ in terms of their capacity to increase synergies and coordination among diverse fields and/or local governmental actors? 2. Do we find a move from earlier – in particular, NPM – reforms to JUG reforms? In particular, do JUG reforms in some ways reverse or undo previous NPM reforms or, rather, they only add up to another ‘layer’ of reforms? 3. What are the key enabling and triggering factors of (relatively successful) JUG measures? What are the (sets of) necessary and sufficient conditions of JUG reforms? The methodical tool on which we rely is a case study of the ASP Pilot Project in Pest County. According to the typology of Blatter and Haverland (2012) there are three types of small-N case studies: a) Covariance (X-centered) studies (COV) wish to detect whether a particular factor (‘X’) makes a difference (MDSD); b) A causal-process tracing (CPT; as a main representative of Y-centered approaches) method is used to reveal how a particular outcome is brought about; and c) A configurational (CON) approach can be used to test which model, explanation or theory fits a given empirical reality the best. From among these approaches, given the ambition of our research, we rely on the second one; we wish to understand how the ASP initiative unfolded over the past decade (including, in particular, why it could not get started for a number of years before it finally ‘got through’); what constellations of necessary and/or sufficient causal factors contributed to its success; and what efficiency gains, intended and unintended effects, quality improvements or changes, and re-configuration of interests and values it triggered. The empirical case study relies on two major types of sources: a) Documentary analysis. Project documents (ÁROP), legislation, academic and grey literature. b) Interviews with key stakeholders such as past (from 2005!) as well as present central government project and policy officers, policy makers and administrators of the pilot local governments, past and present users of (shared) ICT services in local and central government organizations; present and past service providers of ICT services (including former industry actors providing software platform and ICT services), and independent industry experts.