Project Objectives

There is widespread recognition that ‘privatization’ has failed to deliver on its promise to provide adequate and effective basic services such as health, water and electricity to low-income households in countries in the South. This has entailed a rethink of privatization efforts, with renewed exploration as to the role that different agencies might play in service provision – from various tiers of government through to the diverse mix that makes up civil society.

There is a danger, however, that this rethink will not be sufficient in depth or range. Much of the work by the World Bank, for example, continues to seek solutions that provide stronger support to the private sector and/or deepen the commercialization of the public sector.

Equally problematic is the fact that the literature on ‘non-commercialized’ service delivery alternatives has been highly localized and sector specific, lacking in conceptual and methodological consistency. This has led to interesting but somewhat arbitrary case studies.

Phase III of the Municipal Services Project is a five year (2008-13) inter-sectoral and inter-regional study that systematically explores ‘alternatives to privatization’ in service delivery, with a focus on three systems: health, water/sanitation and electricity.  Our goals are to develop conceptual and methodological tools that allow researchers and practitioners to better examine and understand historical, contemporary and proposed alternatives to service commercialization, with a focus on sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and Asia.

Throughout the research we will emphasize ‘health systems’, not specific diseases or selective health interventions. Health systems should promote equity, solidarity, empowerment and development. These have been eroded by commercialisation, vertical programming, macro-economic policies associated with neoliberalism, cost-driven notions of efficiency, and governance failures. We are particularly concerned to link primary health care approaches with alternative forms of water/sanitation delivery and electricity.

In the first stage of the research a set of norms will be developed to evaluate the conditions necessary for progressive service delivery alternatives to emerge and be sustained. These include equity, universality, solidarity, quality and quantity of services, links that integrate the three systems, gender, comprehensiveness, sustainability, workplace health, efficacy and governance. These conditions will be tested against a comprehensive review of existing and proposed alternatives in the three sectors identified, in as many countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America as possible (by tapping into the already extensive regional networks of proposed project partners).

The historical survey of alternatives includes critical studies of early state-planning, welfare, health and municipal alternatives as well as an examination of alternatives proposed and tested by nationalist movements, recognizing that under contemporary conditions a rather different configuration of forces for change exists. Under ‘existing alternatives’ we will investigate such models as public-public partnerships, utility management transformation, worker managed co-ops, community owned systems, participatory models, progressive financing and redistributive schemes (such as life-line water and basic health) as well as rights-based constitutional approaches.

What needs to be stressed is that many public sector bureaucracies have thoroughly imbued a commercial ethos and that future progressive public delivery would require both reclaiming and transforming the state. We are also aware that many alternatives are vulnerable to outflanking maneuvres by private sector interests and that isolated alternatives may easily run aground. We are interested in understanding the robustness of alternatives at the central and local levels and how a local system, in particular, might have broader systemic and multi-scalar linkages that enable it to be sustained and/or reproduced.  In doing so, we seek to understand the common challenges facing health and municipal workers, progressive governments, communities, engineers, town planners and social movements.

This ‘mapping’ of service delivery alternatives will involve desktop research and literature reviews but will also require extensive engagement with government officials, social movements, trade unions, academics and NGOs involved in alternatives to gauge better the extent to which these various systems meet the evaluative assessment criteria. Face-to-face interviews, web dialogues and participation in workshops and conferences are some of the ways in which data will be collected. Horizontal studies of particular social groups involved in the development and implementation alternative service delivery will also be undertaken (e.g. public sector unions, social movements).

At the completion of this one-year mapping exercise a workshop/conference will be held to assess the outcomes of the survey, to refine the conceptual models and methodologies employed, and to identify a set of case studies for more in-depth research. The selected case studies will represent a cross-section of sectors, regions and models highlighted by the mapping exercise to be the most significant to furthering our understanding of the (potential) success of alternative service delivery systems.

This second stage of the project will involve a wider selection of research tools and participants, ranging from quantitative surveying techniques to detailed ethnographic studies. In all cases the research will be as participatory as possible, involving service users, workers and producers in an effort to capture a broad a set of opinions as well as building research and service delivery capacity.

The project will continuously reflect on lessons learned in the research to refine investigative techniques and interpretations, but a final stage of the project will examine the research effort as a whole in an effort to understand better the inter-sectoral and inter-regional significance of the findings, with a particular emphasis on the implications for service delivery options in South and Southern Africa (which were the foci of earlier phases of the MSP.

We will also identify related research activities to develop possible collaborative initiatives that build on MSP’s core work.This will expand the reach of our work while at the same time bringing in additional skills and resources to the project.

Research products will include academic papers, books and Occasional Papers, as well as more popular forms of dissemination such as policy papers, broadsheets, newspaper articles, conferences and workshops, and electronic media such radio and video production where appropriate. The website will be the principal means of information distribution, with some printed material. English will be the primary medium of dissemination but translation will be provided where necessary (notably into Spanish).

The project will also advocate for progressive service delivery reforms, based on research findings. This advocacy work will range from the local (e.g. municipal government departments in a particular city) to the multilateral (eg. the World Health Organization) and will include government officials, labour unions, NGOs, social movements, academics, donor agencies, development banks and other relevant decision makers.

Finally, an important objective of the project is to develop research that is relevant and useful to communities and organizations at the grassroots levels.  The MSP strives to support and facilitate popular education through a variety of publications and multimedia resources.

MSP strives to create a process of knowledge translation, not merely knowledge dissemination.  As such, knowledge translation takes place in multiple directions, with information flowing up, down and out, and with traditional lines between ‘observers’ and the ‘observed’ blurred in favour of a more equitable process of learning and training that generates a broader sense of project ownership and sharing.

The participation of academics, unions, social movements and NGOs on the project Steering Committee is one indication of this commitment to broad-based participation and knowledge sharing.