What Services are Public? What Aspects of Performance are to be Ranked? The Case of “Services of General Interest”

ABSTRACT

In this article, we focus on the difficulties in evaluating the performance of so-called services of general interest. These services generally include such services as water and electricity supply, telephony, postal services, and public transport, where providers are subjected to certain universal service obligations. Because of the tensions between European internal market requirements and these universal service obligations, there exists considerable debate on the criteria to be used to evaluate the performance of these services. In addition, the status of these public services as “public” or “essential” services is disputed. Rankings of the performance of these services will always reflect a certain dominant definition of performance. Ranking schemes as a result both reflect and create performance.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Research for this article was funded through grant RES 153-27-0004 from the ESRC Public Service Programme on “Public attitudes towards services of general interest in comparative perspective.” An earlier version of this article was presented at the International Public Management Network Workshop (IPMN) in Oxford, 7–9 August 2007. I would like to thank the participants of this workshop (especially Christopher Hood, Cristopher Ballinas Valdes, and Colin Talbot), as well as Judith Clifton, John Stewart, Peter Behrens, Mike Smith, Barbara Allen, Tony Prosser, and Allison Glazebrook for their comments and for providing me with additional material.

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Steven Van de Walle

Steven Van de Walle ([email protected]) is associate professor of public administration at Erasmus University Rotterdam. He has previously held positions at the Institute of Local Government Studies at the University of Birmingham, the Public Management Institute at K. U. Leuven (Belgium), and the Campbell Public Affairs Institute, Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, at Syracuse University. His main research interests are with trust in government, citizens' perception of the public sector, public opinion surveys, and comparative government performance.