Alternative Service Delivery

Alternative Service Delivery: Readiness Check synthesizes academic and practitioner knowledge about alternative service delivery (ASD) systems. This handbook offers information and insights that local governments can use to provide public services more effectively and efficiently. It serves as a primer about alternative service delivery, intended to guide investigation of new approaches to service delivery. It derives from multiple conversations with local government practitioners in Illinois who were frustrated by a lack of guidance on how to think about alternative service delivery methods for public services, and in what circumstances different alternatives were more or less successful. This handbook is written for both appointed managers and elected officials who are looking for innovative ways to consider service delivery and want to answer the basic question, “Can we be doing this better?” Why does your local government want to consider providing public services in new, alternative ways? As the cases in this handbook demonstrate, jurisdictions that successfully develop and implement an alternative service delivery method are driven by a desire to improve service effectiveness. Local governments that move from tactical to strategic thinking about service delivery are the ones more likely to improve services using different forms of alternative service delivery. The kinds of issues and types of questions examined in this handbook range from how to best handle such demand-driven services as allocation of police and fire resources to how to share expensive equipment that your jurisdiction needs only some of the time. The stories, solutions, and evidence are intended to help local government officials understand the differences between delivery alternatives and the prerequisites for developing and implementing each option.

There is a vast literature for and against privatizing public services. Those who are against privatization are often confronted with the objection that they present no alternative. This book takes up that challenge by establishing theoretical models for what does (and does not) constitute an alternative to privatization, and what might make them ‘successful’, backed up by a comprehensive set of empirical data on public services initiatives in over 40 countries. This is the first such global survey of its kind, providing a rigorous and robust platform for evaluating different alternatives and allowing for comparisons across regions and sectors. The book helps to conceptualize and evaluate what has become an important and widespread movement for better public services in the global South. The contributors explore historical, existing and proposed non-commercialized alternatives for primary health, water/sanitation and electricity. The objectives of the research have been to develop conceptual and methodological frameworks for identifying and analyzing alternatives to privatization, and testing these models against actually existing alternatives on the ground in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Information of this type is urgently required for practitioners and analysts, both of whom are seeking reliable knowledge on what kind of public models work, how transferable they are from one place to another and what their main strengths and weaknesses are.