The Black Hole of Public Administration

Chapter 8 Alternative Service Delivery: The Thin Edge of the Wedge

CHAPTER 8 AlternativeServiceDelivery:TheThinEdgeof theWedge No one has “the answer”, there is no blueprint...[it] will involve a process of public learning of a high order. —Steven A. Rosell Introduction The federal government’s mid-1990s agenda was dominated by program review, which was aimed at redefining the roles and responsibilities of government in light of extreme fiscal pressures. Its goals included putting the emphasis on core responsibilities and increasing service delivery efficiency. Onesignificantfollow-onwasthe1995frameworkforalternate service delivery (ASD), issued by the Treasury Board Secretariat as a template to guide choices of delivery arrangements so as to provide more seamless and citizen-centred service, including organizational structures outside the public sector and crosssectoral partnerships. Alternative service delivery is a fuzzy expression. First, it refers clinically to the fact that there often exists a variety of alternative ways to deliver a given program or service. 307 308 The Black Hole of Public Administration Second, it connotes a critical evaluation process through which one may explore the constellation of approaches available for the delivery of programs or services. The possibilities range from tinkering with quality service initiatives and re-engineering of existing processes, to partnering, contracting out, devolution and privatization (Lindquist and Sica 1995). Finally, it was a slogan (no longer in vogue) used to identify a policy initiative designed to promote the idea that an active search process would ensure that all programs would be delivered in the optimal way, in some unclear sense of the term (Canada 1995). The 1995 ASD policy initiative tended to frame the public policy questions in a rather restrictive way: it presumed that the task at hand was well defined and that the range of alternative delivery instruments was well-specified. Consequently, the sole remaining problem was to ensure that the most technically efficient/economic stratagem was selected. To some extent this early formulation trivialized the real-life complexity of policy problems that are usually rather ill-defined: the policy issue is often not well understood and cannot be easily collapsed into well-structured program tasks. Moreover, the range of plausible alternative delivery schemes may not be well-specified, so choosing the best delivery scheme is no simple task. In the public policy literature, such ill-structured problems are called “wicked problems”: pertaining to issues in which goals either are not known or are very ambiguous, and in which the means-ends relationships are highly uncertain and poorly understood (Rittel and Webber 1973). Except in rare cases where problems and issues, ends, means and means-ends relationships are well defined, it is not always possible to establish clearly even whether or not a program in existence or a delivery mechanism in place are effective responses to the basic governance questions that have led to their being set up in the first place. Consequently, it is not clear that one can meaningfully address the issue of the appropriate new roles and relationships that would emerge, if a preferred delivery scheme is adopted, without first exploring what are the basic questions to 309 Alternative Service Delivery: The Thin Edge of the Wedge which the programs and the delivery mechanisms are supposed to respond. This is quite important because just as program review quickly lost its vocation to redefine the role of government and took on a cost reduction focus, so the ASD initiative morphed from a broad ‘choice-of-instrument’ philosophy into something that was more about improving access and service performance using a traditional ‘inside-out’ view, with technology being regarded as a key driver for reducing costs. Whiletheterm‘ASDinitiative’hasdisappearedfromtheofficial ‘lingo’, the original philosophy for the federal approach thrives. Some significant strides were made on service improvements but limits were rapidly reached: the much more difficult task of service transformation had to be tackled. Contextualizing the alternative program delivery debate amounts to exploring the general policy questions to which the debate has been trying to respond and to ascertaining what the dynamic social learning mechanism is that is likely to respond in a most effective way to the original concerns (Michael 1993; Lévy 1995). This broader approach obviously complicates matters under discussion. But it has two important advantages. First, it raises the questions of governance and effectiveness explicitly, and ensures that the debate focuses on the dynamic and creative learning that is necessary, and is not restricted...