When the time is right: testing for dynamic effects in collaborative performance

ABSTRACT

Evaluations of public service collaborations tend to ignore time and timing as potential explanatory variables. Drawing on theories of environmental dynamism, organizational inertia, accountability ‘drift’, and isomorphism, we test whether the timing of inter-municipal cooperation, and its duration, affect financial performance for solid waste collection inter-municipal partnerships in the Spanish region of Catalonia over the period 2000–2019. Though still present and significant, the cost advantages of cooperation declined over this period due to population growth and reduced interdependence between municipalities. Timing of cooperation has no effect on savings; although early-adopter and follower groups differ in policy objectives.

KEYWORDS:

• Collaborative public management
• organization theory
• inter-municipal cooperation
• inter-organizational relations
• local government
• shared services

Acknowledgments

This research received funding from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (PID2019-104319RB-I00) and Generalitat de Catalunya (2021 SGR 00261). We are grateful to officials in the Catalan municipalities who responded to our survey; to the Commissioner to Guarantee Access to Public Information (GAIP-Generalitat de Catalunya) for her support in obtaining additional information; and to the University of Barcelona for providing our baseline survey data. Research ethics approval for the follow-up survey was granted on 16^th March 2020 by the University of Oxford. Helpful comments were received from Han Wang, and from participants at the Fall 2022 Conference of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM).

Disclosure statement

The authors declare not to have any conflict of interest.

Notes

1. For the basic equation we use the same variables as in Bel and Costas (2006), except for provincial wage level. Local-level wage estimates do not exist in Spain. Provincial level estimates were provided by the Savings Banks Foundation (Funcas) until 2010 and is no longer available.

2. In a minority of cases, waste collection is managed by a mixed public-private firm. We therefore define private control as when the private firm holds the majority of shares in the mixed firm.

3. The variable PopDens has a correlation of 0.82 with Volume. Although this relationship does not affect our key variable Cooperation, to ensure that it did not influence the coefficient for volume, as per the results of the test for scale economies, we re-estimate all models without the variable density (which was not significant in the estimations in Table 4). The results were identical for signs and significance, and the results for scale economies were not altered in any case (available upon request).

4. Data on the different types of IMC governance (counties or voluntary associations) was not recorded in the baseline (2000) survey, so no estimation with that comparison can be made for the whole sample. The 2019 survey did obtain that data, with 71 municipalities cooperating through counties and 11 through voluntary associations. We thus disaggregated the Cooperation variable into Coop_County and Coop_Mancommunity, and re-ran the 2019 estimations. Results (included as table SM2 in the online appendix) suggest cost savings with voluntary associations compared with stand-alone provision, while cooperation through counties does not show difference in costs, consistent with results for year 2019 in Table 4 above.

5. Importantly, IMC in waste collection in Catalonia is implemented by institutionalized cooperation, membership of which is less volatile than interlocal contracts. Municipalities cannot switch easily from one to another cooperation arrangement (because they cannot switch from one county to another at their own will). Furthermore, our survey contained an explicit question about potential previous experiences of cooperation. Therefore, the information on cooperative status obtained in our municipalities is highly stable and reliable.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación [PID2019-104319RB-I00] and Generalitat de Catalunya [2021 SGR 00261].