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Common Pressures

• Globalization-global pressures to cooperate and compete in new ways;

• Dissatisfaction-ever rising expectation of citizens; and

• Budget stringency-the need to reduce deficits.

Common Responses

• Decentralization of authority within governmental units and devolution of responsibilities to lower levels of government (for example, municipalities);

• A reexamination of what government should both do and pay for, what it should pay for but not do, what it should neither do nor pay for;

• Downsizing the public service and the privatization and corporatization of activities;

• Consideration of more cost-effective ways of delivering services, such as contracting out, market mechanisms, and user charges;

• Customer orientation, including quality standards for public services;

• Benchmarking and measuring performance; and

• Reforms designed to simplify regulation and reduce its costs.

Common Dilemmas

• The tension between decentralizing and delegating service delivery (with its greater acceptance of risk-taking) and pressures for accountability to the taxpayer;

• A similar tension between the desirability for flexibility and experimentation on the one hand and the problem of avoiding politically embarrassing mistakes;

• The advantages of consultation and consensus development versus the danger of becoming captive to narrow interest groups and the necessity for rapid decision-making often forced by external economic events;

• The potential of media as a means of communicating with the pubic versus the threat of media as an undue policy influence;

• The need to serve citizens as customers on the one hand, while not neglecting the disadvantaged or vulnerable who may not be able to speak up as customers;

• Increasing local responsibility (devolution) while compensating for unequal local resources;

• Balancing the advantages of information technology in terms of service delivery and the availability of public information versus citizen privacy and unrealistic expectation for governmental response; and

• Conflict between deficit reduction in the name of future growth and the need for public investment in human capital, infrastructure and research and development.

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