Abstract
Increasingly, governmental functions and public services incorporate significant roles for private sector or civic organizations. These roles play out in a variety of relationships from advisory, to collaborative, to contractual, to full partnerships. What principles and frameworks are needed for sharing responsibilities and exchanging information among networks of diverse organizations in ways that generate public value and satisfy public requirements for fairness, accountability, and competence?
Keywords
inter-sectoral relations, network governance, partnerships
Description
Grounding the research on Governance of public-private-civic sector relationships
Increasingly, governmental functions and public services incorporate significant roles for organizations outside the government. Many government functions involve private sector or civic organizations in a variety of relationships from advisory, to collaborative, to contractual, to full partnerships. These arrangements can involve a variety of forms such as formal outsourcing of some or all of the business processes that engage citizens or reliance on businesses to provide back office operations for government agencies. In some areas, such as pensions, a complete picture of a person?s options or entitlements requires gathering data from separate private and government programs. Typically, these public-private-civic organizational relationships involve the use of ICTs for data gathering and transmission, communication, records management, transactions, and other activities. Regardless of the form of these arrangements, however, government must retain its responsibilities to assure equity, accountability, competence, and transparency. With so many complicating factors, these relationships, although common, often work poorly and are not well-understood.
To date, research has demonstrated the difficulties of cross-sector collaboration and a lack of models and incentives for creating sustainable working relationships and shared responsibilities. Trust, reliability, and risk management among the participants are important considerations in launching, managing, and terminating such relationships. Moreover, ICTs still tend to reinforce existing organizational structures instead of creating transparency or new forms. It is clear that effective cross-sector relationships require not only new technical architectures, but also shared metadata, data standards, and integrated business processes. They necessitate mutual adjustment and learning. Perhaps more fundamental, they beg a careful re-examination of the desired scope and purpose of government. Accordingly, they demand a legal framework and public management repertoire for governing multi-sector involvement in data collection, information management, service provision, and accountability
Research question
How to create a scalable and adaptive multi-faceted framework for sharing responsibilities and exchanging information among diverse public, private and civic organizations, satisfying public requirements and generating public value?
- Determine which kinds of functions and tasks should be performed only by governments and which can or should be carried out by cross-sector arrangements.
- Develop a legal framework and effective governance structures for cross-sector arrangements.
- Set conditions for ensuring requirements are met and develop mechanisms for measuring performance and public value across all participants.
- Create policies and strategies for ensuring integration and accountability among all participants.
- Develop semantic-based information processing and aggregating mechanisms for effective and secure information exchange.
- Explore ICT platforms that support cross-sector ways of working.
Link to the final eight scenarios
Almost all of the scenarios incorporate some form of cross-sector relationship in service delivery. Orchestrating Government , Ambient Government, Individualized Society, and Incident Politics all present numerous opportunities and strong need for these relationships. In these scenarios government fluctuates in intensity from facilitating services through different channels to reaching out for high levels of citizen interaction, while other sectors play significant roles in service delivery and citizen interaction. In all of them, policies, business rules, and management models are needed to guide these types of relationships. The Empowering State and Government Keeps on Trying scenarios strongly emphasize gaining public trust in a system in which government provides basic services and collaborative public-private-civic relationships provide others. Only in the Transition scenario are these relationships more focused on traditional notions of regulation and oversight.
Link to the gaps and gaps storyline
Several of the gaps address public-private-civic relationships, some in the context of the changing role of government and others through attention to increasing personal choice and responsibility, as well as optimum use of the market as a source of public services. In particular the Lean Government storyline states that if services are to be outsourced then understanding who will create, maintain, and govern the services is critical. In the storyline of disappearing geographic borders, citizens choose not only their local government but have their choice of service providers. However, too little is know about the design and effectiveness of shared services or a menu of services, or about the optimal conditions for creating and sustaining them. In all cross-sector service situations, respect for citizens rights is an issue as are universal accessibility and transparency. Research aiming at comparative legal and policy analysis could be useful as well as research on cooperation between private organizations and government . Even for more traditional outsourcing, research is needed into the conditions for generating public value according to the nature of the service.
Link to the roadmapping workshops
The array of possible relationships among public-private and civic sectors was discussed in all of the roadmapping workshops. In Delft in particular, the participants developed a major research theme around these issues. Many of these discussions revealed serious near-term research questions that must be addressed before significant innovation can take place on this topic. All of the workshops touched on the need for a new legal framework to govern innovative service structures, including those involving cross-sector partnerships. Finally, the question of how ICT can be used to redesign government structures was part of many discussions which leads to a related question?how will these redesigned systems incorporate private and civic organizations as key players and how will their activities be governed, managed, and evaluated?
