A Typology of Shared Service Provision in Australian Local Government

Abstract Disappointment with the results of forced amalgamation programs across almost all Australian local government jurisdictions has created great interest in shared service models as an alternative method of improving the operational efficiency of local councils, while at the same time preserving local democracy and local autonomy. While an embryonic literature on shared service provision in the Australian municipal milieu does exist, much remains to be done. This paper seeks to contribute to this nascent literature in two main ways: (a) to locate shared services in local government within broader global trends and theoretical disputations on devolution and local economic development, highlighting the importance of political geography in these debates; and (b) in the light of this complexity and ambiguity, develop a new typology of local government shared service provision to inform public policy making on real-world problems in Australian local government. Keywords: Amalgamationlocal democracylocal governmentspatial scale economiesshared services Acknowledgements Brian Dollery would like to acknowledge the financial assistance of the Australian Research Council Discovery Grant DP0770520. Notes 1. See, for example, Tomkinson (Citation2007). 2. In contrast to this literature, see Crook and Manor (Citation1998, p. 1) for a list of politically expedient reasons as to why decentralisation has been endorsed across particular kinds of jurisdictions. 3. As Agnew (Citation1987, pp. x–xi) has observed, 'place [appears] in social science as a social-categorical rather than a geographical concept'. Moreover, he cites Foucault approvingly: Space was treated as the dead, the fixed, the undialectical, the immobile. Time, on the contrary, was richness, fecundity, life, dialectic … The use of spatial terms seems to have the air of anti-history … They didn't understand that that [these spatial configurations] … meant the throwing into relief of processes—historical ones, needless to say—of power.