Australian Politics and Policy - Senior, 2019a

Australian Politics and Policy
important that local governments work to ensure responsibility for climate change
adaptation is shared between the public and private sectors, and communities. 59
Reluctance to change service-delivery models
Local governments design services to meet local needs. However, sometimes there
can be a reluctance to change service-delivery models. The dominance of different
functions performed by local governments across Australia’s states and territories
also influences their capacity to alter service delivery models. For instance, social
services are often amenable to delivery by non-government providers, while major
infrastructure is increasingly provided through public–private partnership (PPP)
models. The way services have been delivered in the past is a strong predictor of
how they will be delivered in the future. There is often considerable reluctance to
change how things are done due to ‘the uncertainty and management structure
costs incurred with a switch of models’. 60
Lamothe, Lamothe and Feiock suggest that ‘in complex and uncertain situations
organizational inertia and incrementalism may limit local public officials’ ability to
depart radically from past arrangements’. 61 This could lead risk-averse managers to
prefer the maintenance of existing service-delivery models over potentially superior,
but uncertain, alternatives.
Other factors that may contribute to resistance to change in service delivery
include:
• concern about the costs associated with change, e.g. the fear that costs of
finding new vendors could outweigh costs involved in managing existing
contracts
• governance structures and skills, e.g. the structures and skills needed to manage
in-house service production can be quite different from those needed to contract
outside vendors
• specific jurisdictional characteristics, such as management capacity (e.g. for
evaluation), management structures (especially the relationship between politicians
and administrators) and the competitiveness of the market. 62
Therefore, when analysing local government service-delivery models, it is wise to
consider the history of services in a locality and the path dependency of servicedelivery
models, alongside the attitudes of public officials.
59 Serrao-Neumann et al. 2015.
60 Lamothe, Lamothe and Feiock 2008, 48.
61 Lamothe, Lamothe and Feiock 2008.
62 Lamothe, Lamothe and Feiock 2008, 28–34.
342