Abstract:

How does the government balance the publicness and efficiency of public service in collaborative service delivery? Existing research mainly focuses on the factors and tactics that may influence publicness or efficiency, but rarely discusses the mechanisms used to balance these dual goals. Given the relationship between publicness and efficiency in the development history of public administration, this paper proposes that to balance publicness and efficiency, publicness should be placed in a dominant position. Put simply, the improvement of efficiency should not affect publicness. Government intervention to achieve publicness should be constrained within a certain limit to ensure the efficiency of service delivery. Using a case analysis of the nonprofit re-lending platform in Y District, N City, this paper presents a theoretical framework to explain the mechanisms of how the government balances publicness and efficiency in collaborative service delivery. The government can achieve and maintain publicness by focusing on the top-level design of collaborative governance mechanisms, namely, through building consensus on collaboration, establishing accountability mechanisms and risk prevention mechanisms, thereby reducing its excessive intervention at the executive and operational levels, which helps to avoid the loss of efficiency. But, the government should limit the partners’ profit-making behavior to the level of execution and operation. This can improve efficiency through the use of market-oriented incentive mechanisms but also prevent partners’ excessive profit-making motivations from harming the publicness of public service.

Key words: government-nonprofit relationships, publicness, efficiency, collaborative service delivery, cross-sector collaborative mechanisms