Local Government Contracting Research Articles

A contractual framework for new public management theory

This paper evaluates the potential for institutional economics to help us frame choices for the design of institutional arrangements aimed at improving public sector performance, and the lessons it offers for the development of a new public management theory. It defines the key elements of transaction cost and principal agency theory and their application to the public sector. Local government contracting, fiscal decentralization, and performance budgeting, applications that share problems resulting from divergent objectives, information costs associated with policy making and implementation, and risks to public sector accountability, are analyzed. This analysis demonstrates that institutional economics can illuminate how public management can effectively utilize private sector solutions by providing the theoretical underpinnings for government reform initiatives.

Trust-Based Relationships in Local Government Contracting

This article examines issues of trust and competition as they relate to a number of services provided by British local government. The first section outlines the changing policy context of competition for local authority services and is followed by a discussion of the nature of trust under contracting, drawing on elements of (primarily) economic theory to identify the features of contracting which we would expect to find in a ‘low trust world’. The authors ask whether these features appear to be present in contracting and point to some features of the CCT legislative framework which may help to explain this. After reviewing private sector practice, the extent to which it could be replicated under CCT is examined.

Enterprise‐Level Regulatory Analysis and Requirements Management

AbstractTo improve overall operational efficiency, a formal requirements management program has been initiated at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory1. The goal of this program is to develop a robust, dynamic, integrated, informative decision base, for Laboratory‐wide use instead of the more typical assemblage and maintenance of many specific “product line” or “product” requirements.The external requirement documents that regulate the Laboratory's activities include U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Orders, Code of Federal Regulations, State of Washington regulations, industry standards, Tribal and local government consent agreements, contracts, city and county ordinances, other Federal interagency agreements, and Battelle Memorial Institute policies. When these documents get updated or revised, these changes can affect the Laboratory's work.The current estimate is that hundreds of external requirements documents yield thousands of individual external requirements. These documents also have a high degree of variability in format and content, both in a particular document and between document types. Given the large number and scope of issues encompassed by these requirements, our review found that the “historical situation” (i.e., information distributed from personal computers, lists, manuals, procedures, correspondence, and personal memory) was no longer sufficient. No unified requirements analysis set identified all of the individual, applicable external requirements in readily retrievable form, nor were the external requirements linked to the systems to which they apply.Similar external requirement document integration efforts by other organizations have produced work that is obsolete by the time they publish it, because of the failure to address the dynamic nature of the external requirements documents. This report describes an automation tool (“System Level Automation Tool for Engineers” [SLATE]) that we use to support requirements analysis and the ongoing management of requirements. Experience with this tool as a key element of requirements analysis and management in a timely, cost‐effective, Laboratory‐wide manner is discussed.Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is operated by Battelle Memorial Institute for the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract DE‐AC06‐76RLO 1830.

Local Government Contracting with The Private Sector

A contemporary exploration of the concept of “private sector delivery of public services” is necessitated by the fiscal “facts of life” prevalent in most local jurisdictions today. Documentation of the mounting costs of local government is readily available. All informed projections suggest that because of inflation and increased labor costs, this spiralina increase will not level off in the near future.