Institutions and Policy Change in Public Services: The Case of Urban Water Management Reform.

摘要

Public services are central to what cities do; decisions cities make about public services are also central to their long term sustainability. Recent assessments of public service strategies have shown that significant improvements are required if the quality of public services is to be maintained, let alone enhanced. The aim of this dissertation is to determine how political institutions -- particularly the quality and quantity of local control -- affect cities' willingness and ability to change the way they provide public services. I focus on answering two questions: (1) Does the type of authority a city has over service provision affect their uptake of a voluntary public service reform program? and (2) Does the level of local authority in an urban governance regime affect the policy strategy and effectiveness of service reform? I use decision making about urban water supplies in the United States and Australia to answer these questions. I first use decision making about the Memorandum of Understanding on Urban Water Conservation in California to understand how different types of local authority affect agencies' decision making about a voluntary program. I find that private service providers and special district governments are more likely to join the voluntary program because of their desire to avoid regulation and their homogenous policy agenda, respectively. I also find that service providers that rely more heavily on contracts -- or are more resource dependent -- are more likely to join. The analyses show that these institutional differences may be more influential on the decision to join or not join the program at its initial inception. Second, I use efforts in the United States and Australia to increase recycled water production to examine how the level of local control affects reform efforts. I find that in Australia, where local agencies have less control over urban water supply strategies, a prescriptive approach to service reform was used and was more successful than the motivating strategy used in California, where local agencies have more control over urban water supply strategies. I also found that implementing this type of reform creates new arenas for action within the urban governance regime, such as regional coalitions and experimental neighborhoods. These findings improve our understanding of how political institutions interact with efforts to improve public services in ways that can significantly affect their success and the political conflict that accompanies them and can be used to support future efforts to enhance the sustainability of cities through public service reform.