Choosing Strategies for Delivering Social Services: Cooperating or Contracting?

While during the last decade public administration and public management literature had showed an avid interest in studying contracting-out and inter-municipal cooperation (IMC) as tools to renew the management of local public services, little theoretical and empirical attention had been paid in analyzing whether the two instruments are alternative or complementary solutions for the reorganization of public services provision. Italy is a case in point to fill this gap. Several studies had in fact showed the widespread diffusion of both contracting-out and IMC in this country during the last years. While allowed either forms of management from the 1990s, moreover, the national legislation partially changed during the last decade: small municipalities are now obliged to co-manage all their basic function; and, more stringent previsions had been introduced for the management of services of general economic interest (SGEI), since all municipalities are now required to adhere to specific IMC mandatory forms. Nevertheless, the municipalities with more than 5,000 inhabitants maintain wide discretion for the management of social and welfare services, thus representing an ideal field of investigation to identify the dynamics of organizational choices, and the possible reasons underlying the selection of available alternatives. Drawing upon these premises, the paper aims at answering the following research questions: RQ1: Do Italian municipalities consider IMC and contracting-out as alternative tools for the delivery of social services? RQ2: How, and how much, municipal choices are influenced by institutional contextual factors, by the structural features of municipal territories and administrative machines, or by agency dynamics, respectively. After providing some general statistics about the diffusion of IMC and contracting-out in Italian local governments, we will then focus on the qualitative analysis of decision rounds in 6 medium-sized municipalities located in three different regional contexts, so as to identify policy mechanisms and hypothesize causal mixes leading to organizational choices in two specific domains of social policy (namely, early childhood and long-term care). The aim of the paper is not only to enrich the knowledge of the management strategies of public services, but also to generate hypotheses on the underlying causes of the organizational choices of the municipalities to be tested in future comparative studies.