This week we ask "how can we improve public services?" In particular, what are the structures and management strategies that best enable effective service delivery?
The quality of public services – whether health, education, water supply, or sewage disposal – has a big impact on all of our lives. How to enhance that quality is therefore one of the big questions for political studies.
Professor Marc Esteve is one of the leading experts on exactly that issue. We have recorded this special episode of our podcast to coincide with his inaugural lecture as Professor of Public Management here in the UCL Department of Political Science.
Mentioned in this episode:
You can watch Marc's inaugural lecture on our YouTube channel, where it will be uploaded in January 2023.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
services, public, public sector, governments, studies, private sector, research, citizens, collaboration, ucl, forms, work, management, societies, relational, analyse, argument, politicians, organisations, marc
SPEAKERS
Marc Esteve, Alan Renwick
Alan Renwick 00:20
Hello. My name is Alan Renwick. And welcome to UCL Uncovering Politics – the podcast of the School of Public Policy and Department of Political Science at University College London.
The quality of public services – whether health, education, water supply, or sewage disposal – has a big impact on all of our lives. How to enhance that quality is therefore one of the big questions for political studies.
And my colleague, Marc Esteve, is one of the leading experts on exactly that issue. And to coincide with his inaugural lecture as Professor of Public Management here in the UCL Department of Political Science, I'm delighted that Marc joins me now.
So, Marc, welcome back to UCL Uncovering Politics.
As with all of our episodes linked to an inaugural lecture, we're going to be focusing on some of the specific pieces of research that you talk about in the lecture. But we'll also be exploring your wider career and your research agenda a little bit more.
So let's maybe start with that big picture and a big opening question. What is it that drives your research agenda?
Marc Esteve 01:25
Well, thank you, Alan. And thank you very much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here again – this is my second podcast.
And it's really great to be able to explain what drives my research to the audience.
So I've always been... I guess that my whole research interest probably comes from the fact that my whole family have been public servants. My father, my mother, my uncles, everyone, my wife now – everyone has been working in one, especially in the education sector. And my father ended up being the head of immigration for the city of Barcelona.
And I remember since I was a kid that both my father and my mother used to argue about how challenging it was to deliver good public services. They were both very adamant on really helping citizens – my father focusing on immigration, my mother was working as a teacher in high school that was a very conflictive high school in a particularly rough area of the city – probably one of the most challenging high schools in Catalonia. And they were both usually arguing how they needed more resources, they needed better management, that they need more political support.
My father used to say that immigration is such a complex topic that sometimes the better you do your job, the more demand you're going to create because obviously, there are, you know, more people that will be willing to come and take advantage of those services. And then my father was saying: Well, but that's exactly what we want – we want to be able to help as many people as possible. We just need to find ways in which we can do that.
So I guess that probably growing up with those ideas certainly affected my research interests.
So the overall sort of research question that drives me is: how to provide better public services. So how to implement those ideas that policymakers have in a better way – achieving higher quality public services, but also making it through efficient ways, to really make sure that we can achieve better services for as many people as possible. That would be the overall idea.
Alan Renwick 03:45
And in your lecture, you talk about a concept called the 'relational state'. And if I understand correctly... So I should just explain for listeners that this episode is going to be released just after the lecture, but we're actually recording it beforehand. So I've seen your slides, but I haven't yet heard the lecture.
So you have lots of slides about the relational state. And if I understand it, that's a kind of core concepts that you use to organise your lecture. So what is the relational state and why is it important?
Marc Esteve 04:12
So the relational state is the overall framework that guides my research. It's a concept that was coined by two colleagues of mine, Xavier Mendoza and Alfred Vernis, more than 20 years ago. And it's a concept that evolves from the idea of the welfare state in which we imagine a government that is very strong and is able and capable of implementing services by itself.
Their idea when they propose a relational state is that public services... Now that we have seen that the demand for public services is increasing, we want more public services than ever. And at the same time, we ask for high quality on all of these public services, but citizens are not particularly willing to pay more taxes to fund these public services.
So there is a bit of a contradiction here because, on the one hand, we want more. But we are probably not willing as a society to give more.
So even though Mendoza and Vernis proposed to kind of break with the idea of the welfare state, and they propose that public services, while they are the responsibility of the public sector of governments, societies should not let governments alone in the delivery of these services.
And what they argue for is an active collaboration between the public sector, the private sector, the nonprofit sector, and citizens. And they go further, and they explain that each of these sectors has a different role within this relational state.
So the public sector, for example, since it's ultimately responsible for the service, should be a leader that should really make sure that the services are high quality and that everyone gets the most out of this collaboration.
The private sector at the same time should understand that maybe the revenues that they can have for one of the projects in collaboration with the public sector might not be as large as they were usually be accustomed to, but that they have, for example, much more stability that they can have in the open markets, working with the public sector.
NGOs, for instance – nonprofit organisations – have to also realise that it's not enough as a business model to live just out of the help of governments or private donors – that in some cases, they can also compete directly with the market and try to help in the implementation of any particular service.
And as for citizens, I think that the best way of explaining our role should be: if you don't want to pay more money to have your streets cleaned more often, at the very least you should make sure that you do not throw your garbage on the streets, right. So this idea of co-responsibility with citizens is quite important. This idea that we should all have very good public services at our disposal is very important. But at the same time, we are active actors in our societies, and the actions that we make in societies will matter too.
Alan Renwick 07:32
Being a Brit listening to that makes me think of David Cameron and the Big Society. Is that where my brain should be going?
Marc Esteve 07:38
Well, I think that... I want to think that I have a lot of ideological differences to David Cameron and his government.
Alan Renwick 07:46
Fair enough.
Marc Esteve 07:47
But I think the idea behind these is we should all have to understand that public services – that demand for public services – is going to increase.
For example, we are getting older, which I think is a very good thing, right? As a society, we tend to live more years than before. But this also means that the needs that we have, for example, in terms of social care or health services are going to increase.
How are we going to face this increase in public services from the government's perspective is something that I don't think we are discussing at this moment. And I think that for a very long time we've seen, for example, public and private sector collaborations from a political perspective, in which probably left-oriented politicians were reasonably happy to externalise public services, whereas left-oriented politicians were probably more against that.
And I think that the idea should be externalisations are not good or bad, per se – they can be good if they're well managed. And good management is something that should not be of any political colour. On the contrary, right. Regardless of which particular policies the governments would like to implement, I think we should really put a premium on how we can implement them effectively, and how at the very end these policies are successful. That's the focus of this concept.
Alan Renwick 09:16
Fantastic. Thank you.
So that's a really great kind of overview of where your research is going.
Just to go back to your childhood, again, and where all of this research agenda comes from. We talked about that a little bit a moment ago. I'm really intrigued by a slide that you've got for your lecture that starts with chess, and then goes to rugby, and then goes through a whole series of different degrees that you've done.
So the path that you have taken to this research agenda is quite something. Do you want to explain for listeners what happened?
Marc Esteve 09:47
Absolutely. It's probably difficult to make sense of my career when you're looking at it.
But when I was a kid, I used to be a chess player. And I would train every afternoon quit seriously. I was not a great chess player, but I was a decent one, I guess.
Over the years though, my parents realised that I was having some issues making friends, probably. I was kind of very close with myself. And then they thought that maybe what I needed was to stop playing chess every afternoon and maybe playing any sport with a team would help.
And as it happened, near my house in Barcelona we had this great rugby field. And then they thought, you know, I was reasonably tall and strong, so they thought maybe rugby is something that he will enjoy. And I agree with them. So I join a rugby team. And I absolutely love it. I discovered that I was, even though I was usually pictured as this kind of lonely kid that will play chess, when I was in a rugby field I would transform myself and really thrive.
So I started playing rugby and I took it very seriously. And I become a professional rugby player.
Alan Renwick 11:08
Wow.
Marc Esteve 11:09
I signed for another club, Futbol Club Barcelona, which people probably know for their football team. They also had a rugby team.
Alan Renwick 11:17
Wow.
Marc Esteve 11:18
And then I start playing with them.
And I suppose I always thought that I would become a medical student. I wanted to be a doctor.
And then the day that I was going to register myself for universities, when I went back home, I told my parents, I've registered for sport sciences.
And then well, my father, kind of, let's say, to be polite, that he didn't quite agree with that decision. And he said, basically, you've made a huge mistake. You like to play sports, but that doesn't mean that you will want to study them. So you should go back and try to change that.
Then my mother being a mother said, you know, you should... She said to my father, you should let the kid do whatever he wants and we should just support him.
So that's what they did. But in fact, my father was quite right. And when I started studying sports science, I realised that what I liked about sport was practicing them, not so much studying them.
So then I told them I would like to quit and go to medical school. And then I think they thought, what if this kid now starts quitting everything without finding his place? So my family told me: we are happy to pay for a second degree. You can study two degrees at the same time, but you're not going to quit nothing.
So then I tried to get into medical school. But the schedule was clashing with my sports science bachelor. So I ended up doing another thing that I thought was very interesting, which was psychology. So I did two undergraduate degrees at the same time – sports science and psychology.
Alan Renwick 13:06
That sounds like hard work.
Marc Esteve 13:07
Yeah, it was-
Alan Renwick 13:08
And playing rugby at the same time?
Marc Esteve 13:09
Well, unfortunately, I got a pretty bad injury on one of my legs. So my professional career lasted only for a couple of years, which meant that I had plenty of time to study.
And I discovered that I absolutely love it. I love studying. It is probably one of the reasons what I've ended up being in academia, because I really love spending time in the library going through papers and reading someone else's studies.
So after that, I did a master's in health science. And then at some point, I thought that I was kind of always very much focused on public services. I realised that all my dissertations, all my sort of final capstones or projects, had been in one way or another related with public services and the management of those services. So I just thought, I was very clear on the idea that I wanted to do a PhD. And I thought maybe a PhD in public management would be in order.
So I joined ESADE, which is a very good business school. And they had some great experts on public management. And they trained me on core management concepts that I was then able to apply to the public sector. And that's how I ended up at UCL.
Alan Renwick 14:22
It's a wonderful story of how academic careers don't always just fall about, which is great fun, and there can be a very meandering path.
I mean, do you think that meandering path still affects the nature of the work that you do today? Does that grounding in medical sciences of various different kinds-?
Marc Esteve 14:38
I think so because I've used... So for example, one thing that you will realise if you go through my CV is that I have published more than 40 papers. None of them are single authored. I've never done a single authored paper because I just love to collaborate with people. And in most cases, these colleagues of mine are from other fields.
So I like to think that I have a very sort of broad approach to public management. I've worked with economist, I've worked with management scholars, I've worked with political scientists, with engineers, with data scientists. And I think that there is a lot of value in really approaching problems from different disciplines.
Alan Renwick 15:21
Fascinating, fascinating.
Let's get on then to some of your particular research.
So as you described it earlier, you argue that the relational state is the way forward, but it's also quite difficult to get the relational state to work effectively. And so a lot of your work has focused on understanding just how can we achieve that.
And I guess one of the core themes in that is that there are lots of different organisational forms that can be followed in the delivery of public services. And some of those might work better than others.
Marc Esteve 15:52
Exactly.
Alan Renwick 15:53
I guess before we go into some of the details, do you want to just explain what are the kinds of options that are available? What do we mean by organisational form?
Marc Esteve 15:59
That's a very good question.
So by organisational forms, we mean what's the difference between implementing a public service through a main governmental body, so classic public sector, or, for example, doing something that is a little bit more real, like a public agency, for example. So what are the differences in terms of the quality of the service – of the efficiency of the service – if we implement a public service through a main governmental body ministry, for example, or through a public agency, which still will depend ministry but will have more managerial freedom and will be further away, so to speak, from politicians.
At the same time, we have other organisational forms that would allow us to collaborate with the private sector over the nonprofit sector, for example, public-private partnerships. And here we can discuss what's the difference, for example, between externalising service and doing what we call a contract to a public-private partnership in which the public sector, for example, wants to build a highway, and they sign a contract with a private provider, for which the private provider is going to build a highway and the public sector is going to pay a little bit every year for the next maybe forty years. In the US now we have highways that have contracts for 80 or 120 years. So it's in a way like asking for a mortgage when we buy a house, right.
And at the same time, we have another organisational form in which the collaboration between the public and the private sector is more active. And we call it a public-private joint venture. In these cases, what we have are new organisations that are managed both by the public and the private actors together. So here we don't have a contractual relation, but really a new organisation in which everyone would be able to have a say.
And one of the things that I've tried to do in my career also was to really differentiate between the concepts of externalisation and privatisation. Because I think that for political reasons we've been using the word 'privatisation' for any situation in which the private sector gets involved in the delivery of public services. So for some people, if right now we have a highway and we externalise this service to a private provider, we will say that this has been privatised.
And I don't think that's necessarily right. I think the way that I understand privatisation is when the government decides that the service should no longer be considered a public service. Therefore, the only role that the government has with that service is to regulate it as any other economic activity in the country. But if it's still considered a public service, which means this is still the responsibility, so the government has to guarantee that everyone receives that service. And the private sector is involved here. We will be talking about some form of public-private collaboration, but I wouldn't refer to it as a privatisation.
Alan Renwick 19:04
So just thinking in the UK context, we can talk about privatisation in relation to British Gas, for example.
Marc Esteve 19:11
Exactly.
Alan Renwick 19:11
But not in relation to the railways.
Marc Esteve 19:13
Absolutely. That's how we picture it. Yeah.
Alan Renwick 19:15
Okay. Great. That's really clear.
And so in the lecture, you talk about several papers in which you've explored different aspects of organisational forms and what works better, what doesn't.
One of those, as you said, we were lucky enough to have you on the podcast last year, and we talked about one of those papers last time, talking about the relative performance of public agencies and public corporations, I think. And listeners will be able to find that episode online.
So let's focus here on another very recent study that you've done with coauthors looking at different structures of accountability for public services. What's the question that you ask there and what you find?
Marc Esteve 19:54
Here the main question was, in some countries, particularly Europe, there is a very large and live debate about whether public services should be directly paid by the public sector – the costs of implementing those services should be covered by the public sector – or whether citizens should pay a fee when they use the services.
So we wanted to know what difference does it make for the quality and the efficiency of the service. So here in this particular study, we were able to analyse how different organisational forms will be affected by asking users to pay a fee or by having governments simply paying the fee themselves for every user.
And what we find is that – which I think is interesting – if you're committed to implementing a service, trying to reach as many people as possible, but you don't care about the quality. So let's say, I mean in a nutshell, low quality service externalisation should work much better.
So the private sector is very good at providing low quality services. And by very good, I mean they do it cheaper. It's cheaper for the private sector to provide low quality public services than it is for governments.
But obviously our listeners as ourselves would prefer to have high quality public services. So the question is, well, when we consider quality, which organisational form works best?
What we have figured out is that there isn't much difference in terms of efficiency when the quality of the service is taken into consideration. So if you don't care about quality, if you want low quality, the private sector will do it cheaper. But if you want high quality, there isn't really strong differences across organisational forms.
Alan Renwick 21:57
There aren't strong differences?
Marc Esteve 21:58
No, there aren't.
But what is interesting is – and probably the question should be – what is the situation that would give us higher quality services? And what we have found is that it's when we externalise the service for private sector. But it's unfortunate for our politicians, because this, you know, this doesn't really play well on a voting poll. It's when we asked users to pay a fee for the service.
And the argument that we used to explain this result is: we don't think that the public sector is very good at holding accountable private sector providers for public services. We don't think that the public sector has the monitoring capacity to really understand how those services are being provided.
But when you ask users to pay a fee for the service, in a way, the private sector now doesn't have one big client, which is the government. But instead, every user becomes a possible client.
So if the quality of the service is not high, the user might stop using that particular service. So the private sector has a much stronger incentive to make sure that the services that they are providing are best or better. That's what the data tells us.
Alan Renwick 23:15
And that's an argument in favour of kind of market-based accountability-
Marc Esteve 23:21
Yeah.
Alan Renwick 23:21
-that we tend to associate with the right. But you're arguing, I think, that the left should listen to this.
Marc Esteve 23:28
So I'm in full disclosure. I'm very left oriented myself, which means that sometimes I find myself in a difficult position, because some of the arguments I sent have been traditionally embraced by right-oriented politicians or individuals.
But my idea is that good management should be transversal. There is no political colour to good public management because at the end of the day, left-oriented politicians or left-oriented individuals like myself, we really care about helping citizens, of having societies with strong public services. And I think that it's our duty to explore every single opportunity that we have to make sure that these services are well provided.
And in that sense, I think that good public management – and in this case, if what works is market rules – then let's make sure that we have governments that know how to operate within those market rules.
And one of the things that we need to explore further is whether our findings are true for every particular service because in this study we have been able to analyse water services. But I would be interested in knowing whether these results hold for more complex services like social services, for example, in which measuring the quality of the service becomes much more difficult. And this is one of the research lines that we are trying to develop at the moment.
Alan Renwick 24:52
And presumably the left is going to be concerned that if you have services paid for through presumably flat fees being paid by individuals rather than through progressive taxation, then there are harmful distributional consequences of that. So I guess your argument would be that we need to deal with redistribution further upstream-
Marc Esteve 25:13
Absolutely.
Alan Renwick 25:14
-rather than in the moment of service delivery.
Marc Esteve 25:16
Absolutely. I think that in the sense the governments should help citizens and all the private sector organisations, because one of the things that we've seen with some of the studies that we've done is that public-private partnerships can work very, very well, but in some cases they can also be really poor deals for governments and citizens, because there are some private sector organisations that in the past have literally taken advantage of, I will say, the lack of management skills that we find in some governments.
In this sense, particularly, for example, at the local level, we've seen a lot of examples across a lot of small municipalities signing public-private partnerships agreements with very large corporations in which on the one side of the table you had extremely well-trained lawyers from the top organisations, the top universities, dealing with very committed public servants, but didn't have that level of skills. So the final agreements that they were signing very, very, let's say, bad for service, right. And I think this is something that we have to fight against.
Alan Renwick 25:48
We're trying to cover a lot of ground here. So there's so much more we could talk about in relation to that paper. But let's move on to another.
And we've been talking there about kind of big structural questions – organisational forms – but you also talk in the lecture about some of your earlier research, where you pointed out that how different structures performed depends also on different kind of management strategies and ways of managing these sorts of networks of collaboration that you have in the relational state. Do you want to tell us a little bit about that work?
Marc Esteve 26:57
Absolutely. One of the studies – one of the first studies that we published – the argument that we have here is that we are not so interested probably in which organisational form works best. But maybe the real question should be – because we have many different organisational forms operating right now – maybe the real question should be how to manage them better. Each and every one of them.
In this particular paper, we looked at how to manage collaborations across sectors. And what we find out is that these types of collaborations entail very, very huge costs in terms of management, meaning they can work very well. But public managers and policymakers should be made aware that they are extremely difficult and challenging to manage, meaning they will have to devote much more attention to these projects than if they were to do it alone in-house.
And I think this is something important because even though in theory they can work very well, I don't think our governments are ready to implement every public sector in collaboration with another organisation, because of the management complexities that would entail.
And what we found in this particular paper is we looked at the leadership style of policymakers and public management, about management story. We also look at how many chats, how many emails, did they even change; how many meetings they had with private partners and other public partners who are involved in these corporations. And what we found is that there is a direct relationship between how active they are in managing these dangers and the final performance, meaning, you know, good projects need a lot of attention.
Alan Renwick 28:48
I love that you managed to go into so much detail into just how people are managing these things across a huge range of different public service delivery units.
And you do that through surveys of lots of people involved, is that right?
Marc Esteve 28:59
Exactly. So in this case, for example, we did something called structural equation modelling, which is very helpful to see the different mediating and moderating relationships that you can have between different variables.
And in this particular study, we use a survey to actual collaboration managers, for managers of these services.
But I think one of the things that I've always tried across my studies is to really look at different sectors and different areas – different services. And I've also been very fortunate to work with very different methods – qualitative, quantitative, experimental designs. And I think this has really helped me to to better understand the reality that I'm trying to analyse. Soif there is one characteristic probably of my research, besides the topic, is these sorts of different methods that I've been able to use with different coauthors to analyse the same thing. And that has certainly helped me.
Alan Renwick 29:59
That leads on one wonderfully to my final question, which is: you've got all of this evidence on what works in terms of how to deliver public services. Are the decision makers for deciding what form these public services will take, are they listening to that kind of evidence or are they making more kind of politically based decisions?
Marc Esteve 30:21
Well the short answer is no, they are not. They are not particularly eager listening to this, as to many other evidences, I think.
But in one of the studies that we've done, we were really trying to understand how the electoral cycle would affect cross-sector collaborations. Our argument was that collaborations are still being perceived as right organisations, so that the involvement of the private sector is still being perceived as something that right political parties would do. And we wanted to see whether that was the case.
So what we did was trying to see if longitudinal data – in this case in Spanish municipalities, we looked at what happens the very year in which elections happen.
And what we found was that, overall, politicians don't want to engage with the private sector when we have elections. But then we wanted to see, okay, this could have two explanations.
One would be: these are very complex projects and maybe politicians don't want to start them at the very end of their mandate, which would be very sensible.
Obviously, the other argument would be: they are afraid of what the public opinion could say. If a newspaper was to publish 'this government is going to privatise water services in this municipality', right.
So in order to differentiate between these two arguments, we looked at how different political parties react to collaboration when we have elections.
And what we found very clearly is that right-oriented political parties care much less about privatisations – in this sense, wrongly named – about cooperating with the private sector when elections come then left-oriented political parties, which is very interesting, because we then did another study in which we asked citizens from right- and left-oriented ideologies whether they care about whether the service was being provided in collaboration with the private sector with the public sector alone.
And the answer was very, very clear: the very vast majority wants high quality public services. And they don't care about the organisational form that governments use to get them those services as long as the services work.
So if I could just send a message to policymakers or politicians, it would be: forget the idea that collaboration with the private sector is something of the right political parties – not at all. Good implementation is something that citizens value, regardless of their political orientation.
Alan Renwick 33:15
What's going on, then? Why are politicians misperceiving public attitudes if they are as you described?
Marc Esteve 33:21
To be honest, I don't know. I don't think all politicians are very rational. I think that this is not the only topic, unfortunately, that they are misperceiving. That would be my opinion.
But I hope that with the recent studies that we have started to publish, they will little by little start to understand that good public management, good governance in the public sector, is paramount for citizens.
And if left-oriented political parties really want to help their citizens, which is what I think we want, I think they should embrace the fact that a strong public sector – and by a strong I don't mean a large one, but I mean, one that it's ready to deal equal-to-equal with the private sector and get good deals with the private sector, get the most out of it, and be able to use all the resources at their disposal – this is something that ultimately is going to help citizens. So I think it should be in their interest.
Alan Renwick 34:14
Well, let us hope they hear that message. You've given it loud and clear. And it's been fascinating to talk about this, Marc. Thank you so much. It's great to have you back on the podcast.
Marc Esteve 34:23
Thank you very much, Alan.
Alan Renwick 34:25
We've been discussing Marc's inaugural lecture. It's called 'Enhancing the Quality of Our Public Services'.
By the time you listen to this, the lecture will already have happened. If you're listening immediately following the release of the podcast episode, however, the recording of the lecture won't be available yet. But it will come very soon, and we promise to add the link to the show notes for this episode as soon as we have it.
In the meantime, we've discussed three of Marc's coauthored studies in particular during the course of the episode here, and details of those are in the show notes for the episode now. And you'll also find there a link to Marc's previous podcast appearance where we explored his work, as I said, on contrasting public agencies and public corporations.
This has been our final episode for 2023. The Christmas tree is up here in Tavistock Square, the chestnuts are being roasted, and we will be taking a little break over the next few weeks. But we'll be back in January with another series exploring the very latest in political science research.
As ever, to make sure you don't miss out on that or other future episodes of UCL Uncovering Politics, all you need to do is subscribe. You can do so on Apple or Google Podcasts, or whatever podcast provider you use. And while you're there, we'd love it if you could take a moment of time to rate or review us, too.
I'm Alan Renwick. This episode was produced by Alice Hart and Eleanor Kingwell-Banham. Our theme music is written and performed by John Mann.
This has been UCL Uncovering Politics. Thank you for listening and have a very happy Christmas.