Beyond the expectations: a citizens-oriented approach towards local shared services performance assessment

Since the '90s, local governments decided to establish cooperation agreements to share some of their services in a joint effort to achieve economies of scale and scope and to reduce expenses for the benefit of efficiency. Nowadays, service sharing, whether established voluntarily or forcibly, is a widespread strategy in many countries. Despite being so common, though, it generally lacks policies of control and evaluation of its effectiveness. Although new approaches to public administration management suggest focusing on a broader scope of performance (Alvesson and Sandberg 2020, Aldag, Warner and Bel 2020) and citizen's needs-based satisfaction (Dunleavy et al., 2006) rather than on the mere cost, most literature does not yet represent the complexity of the performance of shared services and cooperation agreements at the local level. One aspect of such complexity is represented by the perception of final users of shared services. Citizen satisfaction can be linked to place brand and site attachment, leading to positive citizen behaviour (Zenker and Rütter, 2014), and can throw the foundations for the co-creation of public value (Osborne et al., 2016). The research highlighted how the perceived efficiency of public services could and should be measured through citizen satisfaction, for instance, by employing questionnaires (Kushner and Siegel, 2005; Gutiérrez Rodríguez et al., 2009). Nevertheless, the research conducted so far does not, for the most part, consider users' points of view on shared services. This study aims at understanding the extent to which performance is measured in local shared services and eventually digs to explore the extent to which citizen satisfaction is taken into account as a measure of performance. By employing an inductive approach spread over two international studies and one Italian double-case study, we provide new foundations for further research in the field, new propositions and a research agenda for empirically testing the new theory that emerges from this study. For this purpose, this research is divided into three outputs. First, a critical literature review to summarise the research that has already been done internationally about performance evaluation of municipal shared services, and specifically, the methodology (where existing) for the assessment of the performance of such inter-municipal collaborations, to highlight the gap in this part of literature. The second article goes in-depth into an Italian case study of Unioni di Comuni that can be deemed "successful" since their municipalities share all the services, to understand the drivers of success and formulate a research agenda to better understand which measure of performance future research should consider for assessing the effectiveness of sharing policies. Within the framework provided by the first two studies, the third article dives into the gap that was hereby identified: the use of citizen satisfaction as a measure of the performance of local shared services. Starting from the assumption that most local services are delivered by Arm's Length Bodies, we conduct an explorative study involving local government experts from eleven countries to compile an inventory of the use of citizen satisfaction as a measure of the performance of local services.