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Australian local government finds itself operating under conditions
of acute financial austerity, manifested most plainly in a
burgeoning infrastructure backlog. Various policy measures have
been adopted to relieve this financial distress, most notably
recent structural reform programs centred on forced council
amalgamation. However, compulsory consolidation has not only failed
to achieve its intended aims, but it has also served to diminish
`local voice' and `local choice' and left a lasting legacy of
bitterness and division. By contrast, as an alternative method of
reaping the benefits of scale, scope, specialisation and size in
local government service provision, but without all the deleterious
effects of forced council mergers, service shared services offer
significant promise for local government. Councils in Cooperation
is the first attempt to comprehensively explore and assess the
potential of resource sharing, shared services and other forms of
inter-council cooperation in the Australian local government
sector. Drawing on the full weight of international and Australian
literature, Councils in Cooperation evaluates the theoretical
literature on shared services and advances a new conceptual
framework for explaining the comparative performance of shared
service programs in practice. The authors consider alternative
models of shared service provision and investigate the relative
merits of these models. The book then systematically assesses the
global empirical evidence on shared services and explores
successful - and failed - attempts at shared services in the
Australian milieu, providing various case studies of Regional
Organisations of Councils, Strategic Alliances as well as vertical
and horizontal shared service arrangements in contexts as varied as
Greater Western Sydney, the NSW Central Tablelands and Riverina,
and Outback Queensland. The policy implications arising from this
wealth of material are examined in depth in Councils in
Cooperation. The authors present a cogent case for policy makers to
encourage local authorities to pursue shared service arrangements
in selected areas of policy provision so as to reap the benefits
which can flow from larger scale and greater specialisation, rather
than rely on the heavy-handed and blunt instrument of forced
amalgamation. Moreover, heightened cooperation between councils may
well foster a `bottom-up' revival of regional development with much
better prospects for success than the current pattern of `top-down'
regionalism simply imposed on regional communities by national and
state governments.
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