Disentangling the separate and combined effects of privatization and cooperation on local government service delivery

Abstract

Inter-municipal cooperation is often regarded as an alternative to privatizing local public services. But cooperation and privatization can also be combined into a composite reform package, where several municipalities jointly issue contracts relating to multiple jurisdictions. Evaluating these ‘hybrid’ reforms rests on disentangling the separate and combined effects of cooperation and privatization. This we undertake for the case of solid waste collection in the Spanish region of Catalonia, using environmental protection as our focal performance metric. Drawing on two waves of data (for 2000 and 2019) for a sample of 186 municipalities that mix public and private with cooperative and autonomous service delivery, we show that superior performance among reformed municipalities is initially confined to those cooperations involving public production. But latterly, any form of cooperation, using public or private production, resulted in significant gains. This reinforces the need for evaluators to isolate the (changing) ‘active ingredient’ in hybrid reforms.