Rethinking Post-NPM Governance: The BureaucraticStruggle to Implement One-Stop-Shoppingfor Government Services in Alberta

Cosmo Howard

# Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014

Abstract New public management reforms have delivered many benefits andalso generated numerous administrative challenges. Chief among the latter isincreased fragmentation of public services and resulting problems of servicedelivery coordination. Recent research on “post-NPM” governance suggestspolitical executives have tried to rectify these coordination problems by verti-cally reintegrating devolved and outsourced service delivery functions into newcentrally controlled service agencies. Research also suggests public servantsoppose post-NPM integration because it threatens their devolved powers. Thisarticle uses an empirical case study of the Government of Alberta’s one-stop-shop service delivery initiative to determine the contemporary drivers of andobstacles to service integration. The study shows provincial bureaucrats pushedfor the integrated one-stop-shop while the political executive defended theexisting NPM-era outsourced delivery network. In the case of Alberta theemerging theory of post-NPM misconstrues the drivers and impediments ofservice integration. Bureaucrats in jurisdictions such as Alberta that pursuedoutsourcing and public service retrenchment are likely to champion integrationreforms such as one-stop-shops because these delivery models favour imple-mentation via public agencies and thus provide a new rationale for publicservice provision. These findings show bureaucrats are playing a larger andmore constructive role in post-NPM efforts to overcome the deficiencies of thenew public management. Furthermore, they highlight the need to rethinkestablished assumptions about bureaucratic attitudes and responses to adminis-trative fragmentation.

Keywords Service delivery . Post-NPM . One-stop-shops . Bureaucratic politics

Public Organiz RevDOI 10.1007/s11115-014-0272-0

C. Howard (*)School of Government and International Relations, Griffith University, Kessells Rd, Nathan, QLD 4111,Australiae-mail: c.howard@griffith.edu.au

Introduction

There is widespread recognition amongst administrative scholars and practitioners thatnew public management reforms delivered many benefits but also created significantproblems. A key problem is the fragmentation of public services brought about bydevolution of managerial responsibilities to specialized agencies as well as theoutsourcing of many public service functions to private contractors (Bouckaert et al.2010). This fragmentation has created difficulties for governments and citizens. Forgovernments, NPM’s emphasis on structural devolution allegedly created control andaccountability deficits, and encouraged public sector organizations and private contrac-tors to compete amongst themselves for resources instead of working together towardsoverarching government goals (Boston and Eichbaum 2005; Christensen 2012).For citizens, NPM’s stress on transferring service delivery responsibilities toautonomous special purpose organizations produced disjointed and inconsistentservice delivery arrangements; research suggests this led to public dissatisfac-tion (Bent et al. 1999).

Researchers have observed recent efforts to grapple with the control and coordina-tion deficits generated by NPM (Bouckaert et al. 2010; Christensen and Lægreid2011b; Peters 2011). They summarise these efforts as a shift towards ‘post-new publicmanagement’. These scholars define post-NPM as an attempt by political executives toreassert control over administrators to address concerns about organizational fragmen-tation and lack of inter-agency cooperation. Renewed control has been used to encour-age and at times mandate coordination in areas such as service delivery, in order to meetpublic demands for better government services. An oft-cited contemporary example ofpolitically driven centralization and coordination is the rise of integrated government‘one-stop-shops’. Here political executives have moved to reverse the NPM-era trendtowards quasi-autonomous, specialized, single-purpose delivery entities. Services arebrought together in a single organization, which often takes the form of a large centralgovernment ministry directly overseen by the political executive (Christensen andLægreid 2011b; Halligan 2007).

Yet, there is plenty of evidence that recent coordination initiatives have encounteredsubstantial obstacles. For instance, despite the widespread political espousal of serviceintegration rhetoric and frequent proposals for one-stop-shops, governments have oftenstruggled to deliver on the one-stop-shop promise—that is, the promise that citizens canget all the services they need under one physical or virtual roof (Langford 2008; Dutilet al. 2010). More generally, scholars of post-NPM appreciate that there have beensignificant obstacles to the political push for integration (Christensen and Lægreid2011a, b). Most concede that decentralized structures and competitive bureaucraticcultures established under NPM continue to influence administrative practice. Theselegacies shape and constrain efforts to control and coordinate public services, leading tocomplex, “layered” and “hybrid” public management (Christensen and Lægreid2011a). There is thus an emerging consensus concerning post-NPM governance, whichsuggests governments are moving to correct the shortcomings of NPM reforms throughpolitically-driven integration efforts, by vertically reintegrating functions devolved andoutsourced during NPM into ministries under direct political control, in order tofacilitate horizontal integration of service delivery. This account of post-NPM alsosuggests bureaucrats tend to oppose vertical and horizontal integration.

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The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate the claim that post-NPMintegration initiatives are efforts of political executives to re-establish control andcoordination in the face of entrenched bureaucratic parochialism and resistance. Thepaper reports on a case study of a one-stop-shop initiative in the Canadian Province ofAlberta. The sparsely populated prairie jurisdiction came to international prominence inthe mid 1990s when populist conservative Premier Ralph Klein instituted a radical newpublic management reform program, which included a one-quarter reduction of publicservice employment, the devolution of health and educational administration to region-al authorities, and an extensive program of privatization and outsourcing, centred ontransferring ‘transactional’ government services such as driver licencing and birthregistrations to private sector “Registry Agents” (Schwartz 1997; Taras and Tupper1994; Townley et al. 2003; Wilson 2000). This strong emphasis on outsourcing reflectsthe dominance of political conservatism and neoliberalism in the province. TheProgressive Conservative party has ruled continuously since 1971, and since the early1990s the provincial government has aggressively expounded a neoliberal critique ofpublic sector inefficiency (Clark 2002; de Clercy 2005; Schwartz 1997; Taras andTupper 1994; Townley et al. 2003; Wilson 2000).

Countering this trend towards decentralization and outsourcing, at the turn of themillennium the Alberta Government announced the creation of an in-house one-stop-shop that would offer government services in person, over the telephone and throughthe Internet, which came to be called Service Alberta. At the same time, the governmentattempted to centralize corporate administrative services such as mail and informationtechnology within Service Alberta. Yet the political executive subsequently starvedthese reforms of funding and offered very little political leadership to encourageintegration. As a result, Service Alberta has not achieved integration of services, butessentially acts as a gateway providing web links and contact information for privatecontractors and other government ministries. The integration of internal corporateservices has also been limited by lack of inter-departmental cooperation and fundingshortfalls.

To explore this puzzle of a political executive seemingly supporting service integra-tion, yet ultimately undermining the reforms, in-depth interviews were conducted withsenior Albertan public servants between 2007 and 2009, along with a systematic reviewof departmental reports and Provincial Legislative Hansard. The method ofinterviewing public servants was chosen for the familiar reason that these officialshave long and detailed involvement in the program areas being reformed, and thus canlikely speak with greater historical nuance about the reform machinations than otheractors such as political representatives and citizens. We must of course acknowledgethat reliance on bureaucratic accounts offers a particular “lens” on the reforms—onethat brings the work of bureaucrats into focus and potentially downplays the reformefforts of politicians (cf. Allison 1971). Our review of official documents goes someway to addressing this risk by providing an independent source for corroborating (orcontradicting) bureaucratic accounts.

Interviews and documents show clearly that Alberta’s post-NPM reforms were notdriven primarily by politicians, nor hampered by bureaucrats. In the Albertan casebureaucrats were the most significant drivers of the decision to implement an integratedone-stop-shop. Bureaucrats promoted the one-stop-shop in part because it gave publicservants a coordinating role in service delivery that could not be outsourced. Service

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delivery integration was thus a bureaucratic survival strategy that furnished a positiverole for administrators in the midst of Alberta’s neoliberal public service “retrench-ment” agenda (Schwartz 1997).

The Albertan political executive initially supported the one-stop-shop idea, notbecause it wanted to reassert executive control and coordination, but because bureau-crats promised integration would deliver a ‘win/win’ outcome of better services andreduced costs. The government endorsed service integration as a result of a concertedpolitical effort on the part of bureaucrats to sideline the outsourced service deliverynetwork and institute a government-run system. Thus in the Albertan case, bureaucraticpolitics was a driver of integration, not an obstacle as is conventionally thought (seeChristensen et al. 2008; Peters 2001; Schedler et al. 2004). Yet the bureaucratic promiseto do more with less ultimately backfired when the reforms failed to deliver immediateadministrative savings and the government refused to provide additional funds toaddress implementation costs. Furthermore, the political executive continued to supportthe outsourcing of services to Registry Agents and was unwilling to allow ServiceAlberta to provide services that would take business away from the private contractors.

Lest the reader think Alberta is an extreme case that cannot provide broader insightsabout post-NPM, it is important to note that in the areas where Alberta did devolveauthority to public servants, post-NPM integration reforms where driven by politicians.The Albertan government gave regional health care agencies managerial authorityduring the 1990s, but subsequently re-centralized decision making because of concernsabout lack of coordination, inefficiency, and inadequate political oversight and control(Duckett 2010: 156). Yet, when similar problems arose in the context of decentralisedtransactional service delivery, the government rejected the structural changes requiredfor integration, despite superficially endorsing the one-stop-shop agenda promoted bybureaucrats. Whereas post-NPM reforms to Albertan health administration involvedpoliticians retrieving powers devolved to bureaucrats, the post-NPM integration oftransactional service delivery would have involved bureaucrats taking functions (andcontractual revenues) away from the private sector. We conclude that whether or notpolitical executives and bureaucrats support or oppose post-NPM integration dependson whether the jurisdiction emphasized devolution or outsourcing in the past.

The study’s findings also challenge existing theories of bureaucratic innovation andleadership. A growing body of research finds bureaucrats do engage in innovation andcan provide limited “transactional’ forms of leadership, yet they are said to remainincapable of promoting whole-of-government coordination and cannot supply newvisions regarding the substantive purpose of government and its relationship to citizens(Peters 2001, 2011; Peters and Helms 2012). The elaborate efforts of Albertan bureau-crats to construct and promote a new integrated model of public service delivery, andthe failure of provincial political executives to supply solutions to the problems ofNPM-era reforms, suggest contemporary bureaucrats have more to contribute tostrategic deliberation about the future role of government and public services thanhas been acknowledged in work on post-NPM to date.

The paper begins by summarising the core tenets of the post-NPM thesis, with aparticular focus on recent contributions by Tom Christensen and Per Laegreid, whichrepresent the most coherent and comprehensive attempts to understand post-NPM todate. It then addresses the interview and documentary research, investigating the claimthat service integration is promoted by political executives but bureaucratically resisted.

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The conclusion explores how existing theories of post-NPM governance should bemodified to take into account the supportive role played by bureaucrats in recent one-stop-shop initiatives.

Interpreting Post-New Public Management Governance

The suggestion that governments have abandoned the new public management and thatwe are moving into a ‘post-NPM era’ has aroused significant controversy amongstadministrative scholars. Claims that “NPM is dead” (Dunleavy et al. 2006) are coun-tered with evidence purporting to show NPM is still dominant and that post-NPM is a“myth” (Lodge and Gill 2011). Recent work on post-NPM charts a course betweenthese two extremes by suggesting post-NPM governance is not a simple rejection ofNPM, but a complex “layering” of new administrative approaches on top of establishedNPM institutions and practices. For scholars such as Tom Christensen (2012), PerLaegreid (Christensen and Lægreid 2011a, b, c), Bouckaert et al. (2010), post-NPMrefers to the era after the peak of governmental enthusiasm for new publicmanagement principles, when governments start to question the benefits ofNPM reforms, grapple with long term and unintended consequences, and modifyor reverse important elements of NPM. The result is an increasingly complex andoften contradictory “hybrid” of administrative systems, cultures and behaviours(Christensen 2012).

Despite acknowledging the complex and fluid nature of post-NPM governance,these authors all point to the same drivers of post-NPM reforms. All stress the role ofpolitical executives in pushing for change. A common claim is that political executivessought greater control of outsourced functions and arms-length public organizations toensure greater coordination and integration of services. This was motivated by a beliefthat administrative structures became excessively fragmented and decentralized as aresult of agencification, devolution and the relaxation of procedural controls during theNPM era. Thus Tom Christensen (2012: 4–5) describes post-NPM reforms as adeliberate response of the political centre to decentralization:

[S]tructural devolution, which included transferring authority from the centralpolitical-administrative level to regulatory agencies, service-producing agencies, orstate-owned companies, was controversial and . . . produced disadvantages . . . Theeffect has deprived the political and administrative leadership of levers of controland of influence and information, raising questions of accountability and capacity.Post-NPM measures, particularly those involving a reassertion of the center, reflectthe fact that political executives are more frequently being blamed when things gowrong, even though they actually sought to avoid blame through devolution underNPM . . . So taking back some power seems natural through post-NPM.

Political executives have consciously sought to reorganize public services to regaincontrol:

When some countries, primarily the NPM trail-blazers, started to move beyondNPM in the late 1990s, executive leaders tried consciously to redesign their civil

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service apparatuses, after increasing worries from the political leaderships oflosing political control and central capacity (Christensen and Lægreid 2011b: 15).

Post-NPM thus reflects a political reaction to and rejection of “the undermining ofpolitical control that resulted from NPM” (Christensen 2012: 3, see also Peters 2010:215). Even opponents of the post-NPM thesis accept that “ad hoc” shifts away fromNPM are “politically driven” (Lodge and Gill 2011: 141). The political drive to counterfragmentation involves vertical (re)integration of devolved public service functions:

Now it was time for the executive politicians to take back some of that controland increase their own capacity to solve societal problems. The measures usedwere to vertically integrate some of the agencies and enterprises again, either bydissolving some agencies and integrating their activities in the ministries, or byestablishing more controls and imposing more constraints on the agencies andstate-owned enterprises (Christensen and Lægreid 2011a: 415).

In addition, post-NPM involves horizontal integration of functions formerly under-taken in separate organisations, such as merging different service delivery outlets intoone-stop-shops to improve customer convenience and administrative consistency(Bouckaert et al. 2010; Christensen 2012: 5; Christensen and Lægreid 2011b: 13).

If NPM principles and reforms have not been completely dismantled, what impactdo they have on contemporary public administration? Christensen and Lægreid (2011c:138) argue organizational structures left over from the NPM era may constrain post-NPM reforms:

Some studies construe post-NPM reforms as a return to the cultural norms andvalues of the traditional Weberian and centralized system, while others emphasizethat NPM has created a new trajectory that makes it difficult to return to the ‘goodold days’—that is, NPM has a constraining effect on post-NPM reforms.

Bouckaert et al. (2010: 30) argue post-NPM efforts to improve cross-governmentintegration are impeded by established administrative cultures:

Coordination requires some flexibility and some willingness to think about policyand administration in less conventional ways, and hence individuals and organi-zations operating in the stereotypical, path-dependent manner usually ascribed to‘bureaucracy’ may be unwilling to move away from existing patterns.

In a similar vein, Aucoin (2002) argues jurisdictions that enthusiastically pursuedNPM found it very hard to “catch the next wave” of reforms such as service integration,because their earlier efforts to decentralize service delivery entrenched new devolvedstructures. Some authors argue NPM has hampered subsequent reforms because itencouraged bureaucrats to behave self-interestedly and to see other agencies as com-petitors. Boston and Eichbaum suggest the horizontal specialization and fragmentationof NPM “have produced turf wars among competing public organizations with expan-sive ambitions, hence hampering effectiveness and efficiency” (Boston and Eichbaum2005). Christensen et al. (2008: 23) briefly suggest post-NPM reforms “tend to run into

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problems of bureaucratic politics and institutional constraints in the implementationprocess” while Schedler et al. (2004: 6) argue recent public management reforms haveencountered “internal bureaucratic politics which resist change of any sort”. Suchaccounts resemble well-established theories of bureaucratic politics (Allison 1971;Halperin 1974) in which administrators narrowly interpret policy and administrativeproblems from their own organizational standpoints, seek greater resources and influ-ence in a “competitive game of pulling and hauling” (Allison 1971: 166–7), and oftenignore or modify executive directives.

Putting these points together, the observed combination of political reassertion,institutional inertia and bureaucratic politics produces increasingly complex post-NPM arrangements:

Our view is that when existing political-administrative systems are confrontedwith new reforms they become partly deinstitutionalized. However, they alsoretain some traditional elements that continue to coexist with reform elements,producing an ever-more complex and layered system as these new elements inturn are adapted and institutionalized. If this view is a valid one, public organi-zations will consist of elements from different eras and reform waves that becomebalanced and rebalanced over time (Christensen 2012: 2).

In summary, the literature on post-NPM governance suggests political executivesseek greater control to counter administrative fragmentation and meet citizens’ de-mands for coordinated public services. Public services parochially protect their ownspecialized functions from executive encroachment, and the outcome, according toTom Christensen and Per Laegreid, is a messy and uneasy combination of old and newadministrative ideas, practices and structures. The next section explores these argu-ments using the case study of Albertan service integration.

Explaining Alberta’s Struggle to Implement One-Stop-Shopping

Interviews were conducted between 2007 and 2009 with 12 senior bureaucrats from anumber of Provincial ministries involved in the implementation of Albertan servicedelivery reforms, including Service Alberta. The sample included senior programofficials directly involved in the ongoing implementation of service integration, includ-ing Assistant Deputy Ministers (ADMs) and Executive Directors, drawn from publi-cally available organizational charts. The small sample reflects the small number ofsenior individuals involved in Albertan service integration, as well as the ‘saturation’ orrepetition of narratives that emerged quickly in the interviews.1 In addition to inter-views, a systematic review of official documentation including annual reports from theAlberta Ministry of Government Services and Ministry of Service Alberta, along withLegislative Hansard, was undertaken for the years 2000–2010. The review of docu-ments helped address the risk that interviewees might forget or misremember events(see Bowen 2009). The next two sections use the empirical data to explore the

1 Because of the small group of staff and the threat of revealing participants’ identities, officials’ titles havebeen mixed, and some quotes were slightly edited to remove comments that could identify interviewees.

Rethinking Post-NPM Governance

contributions of Albertan politicians and public servants to the provincial one-stop-shop reforms.

A Political Push for Integration?

A superficial reading of Alberta’s shift to post-NPM service integration suggestsPremier Klein and his successors drove the one-stop-shop reforms. The roots of theAlbertan service integration movement date back to 1993, when, at the height ofKlein’s NPM revolution, the government outsourced many ‘transactional’ services toprivate sector providers called Registry Agents, who were paid according to transactionvolume. The outsourcing of transactional services was based on two political priorities.The first, according to an interviewee, was Premier Klein’s ideological view that“Government shouldn’t be in the business of doing business” (Executive Director). Asecond driver was a political desire to increase convenience via “one window service”(Legislative Assembly of Alberta 1993: 920). The government took services such asdriver licensing and birth registration away from line ministries and bundledthese together in a package to be offered by Registry Agents, allowing citizensto deal with multiple programs in one place. Registry Agents were also smaller,more numerous and more widely geographically spread than existing govern-ment shopfronts, further improving access especially for the sparsely inhabitedareas of the province (ibid).

This outsourced model encountered a major challenge as Internet and call-centreservice delivery technologies emerged in the late 1990s. Web and telephone deliverysystems favour centralization because of the large costs associated with developing andmanaging Internet systems as well as the dramatic economies of scale in call-centreoperation. As a result, governments have tended not to rely on decentralized networksof small private providers to develop and implement web and telephone servicedelivery systems (Dutil et al. 2010). The Alberta Government recognized this problemand in 1999 Premier Klein established a Ministry of Government Services (MoGS)with a mandate to coordinate different ministries so as to allow for the use of theInternet to “improve Albertans’ one window access to the services of Government”(Alberta Government Services 2000: 14). MoGS quickly went to work collab-orating with ten other ministries and developed, in the words of DeputyMinister 2 Roger Jackson, a “comprehensive plan to provide Albertans withinformation, products, and services from across government through a singleweb–based service gateway”, to “be implemented over the coming 3 years”(ibid). In the following year the Alberta One Window program was expanded toencompass “physically accessible” offices, signalling interest in developinggovernment shopfronts alongside the private Registry Agent network. In 2006MoGS was renamed the Ministry of Service Alberta.

While work on integration of government services to citizens was underway, thePremier launched another ambitious agenda: integration of internal or ‘shared services’,such as information technology, mail handling and printing. Service Alberta was givenresponsibility for implementing this shared services initiative in addition to its citizen-

2 Deputy Ministers are the Canadian equivalents of permanent secretaries—they are the bureaucratic heads ofdepartments.

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facing one-stop-shop. Appearing before the Executive Council on March 8, 2000,Premier Klein singled out the shared services reforms and argued they would savemoney while improving service delivery:

Shared services is really about changing the way we do business so that we areindeed more responsive to client needs and ultimately the needs of Albertans . . .It will also give us the ability to appropriately identify cross-government issues,expectations, and priorities and will create an effective climate for future changeand innovation. We are committed to achieving those benefits with no netincrease in funding . . . In my view, this initiative is a win/win for governmentand for the people we serve (Legislative Assembly of Alberta 2000: a28).

Other integration initiatives were also launched by the political executive. Klein’ssuccessor Ed Stelmach extended the emphasis on service integration by launching aneffort to develop a one-stop-shop for social and human services, called the Social-Based Assistance Review (SBAR) (Legislative Assembly of Alberta 2010: 757). Healso promoted Service Alberta from the second-to-bottom position in the orderof Cabinet precedence to the second from the top, giving the portfolio to theminister in charge or Alberta’s powerful Treasury Board, seemingly signalling adesire to drive integration from the core executive. Both Premiers’ support formultiple integration initiatives gives credence to the post-NPM story of politi-cally driven reform.

Yet deeper investigation reveals serious problems with the argument that Albertanservice integration was politically driven. After launching the Alberta One Windowinitiative, Premiers Klein and Stelmach did not use their considerable executiveauthority to require ministries to work together to achieve integration. According toofficial documents, service integration was to be voluntary. Departments would “con-tribute to Service Alberta in keeping with their own business plan priorities” and“partners in the Service Alberta initiatives [would] proceed at their own pace and learnfrom experience” (Alberta Government Services 2002: 49). The Ministry ofGovernment Services characterized this strategy as an “incremental implementationapproach” (ibid.). An Executive Director noted, “I don’t think we’ve had [a] strong amandate here. I think that’s been the issue from day one”. Another public servantagreed a lack of executive direction hampered integration, since “there was no, therewas a direction from up high but it wasn’t definitive enough to really provide a clearroad map so that everybody was actually on the exact same road” (ADM). As a result,“that void got filled in by all the other Ministries saying, you know what, I don’t want[to integrate] and I don’t have to and I’ll do my own little thing on the side” (ADM).Another interviewee confirmed ministries exploited the lack of central direction andcompulsion, and carried on as usual:

[I]t was a great idea, but the execution was poor. That’s all there was to it . . . Idon’t think there was enough thought put into actually how this thing would beexecuted, at all. It was just a case of, we have this great idea, and it is, you willgain efficiencies, but they left it up to the twenty four ministries who were notworking as one government, they were very much siloed, they were not workingas one body to try to make the government better (Executive Director).

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Furthermore, the government appeared unwilling to support integration financially.Because the integration of internal services was to be ‘revenue-neutral’, Service Albertareceived no net increase in funding for the shared services reforms. At the same time,the government was also tightfisted with new funds for the external one-stop-shop.Thus, despite being created with an explicit mandate to reform service delivery, theMinistry of Government Services noted at the end of its first year that it “. . . had todirect some of its base budget to the Alberta One Window as long term funding had notbeen allocated” (Alberta Government Services 2001: 15). The Ministry received ahumble $1.5 million one-off operating grant to fund Alberta One Window infrastruc-ture as well as other initiatives (Alberta Government Services 2001:14). Thus while thegovernment appeared to commit in principle to integrated services, the sense within thepublic service was that the political executive was not prepared to exercise authority byimposing integration on line ministries, nor to allocate the resources necessary forimplementing the reforms.

A more fundamental political barrier to integration was that politicians were opposedto upsetting the established system of outsourced service delivery. A government one-stop-shop threatened the existing model because it would compete for business withprivate Registry Agents. Putting services online or offering them through a governmentshopfront would harm Registry Agents’ revenues:

Imagine you’re a Registry Agent network with some pretty strong ties into thepolitical realm. Service Alberta comes along and says you know what, we’regoing to open our service role up, not just for you to renew your drivers licence,why not your marriage certificate, why not you know when your child is born andall your vital stats are taken. I’m sure you can imagine that is not going to be wellreceived (Executive Director).

The point about Registry Agents being politically well connected was also made inanother interview:

I don’t think [the government] wants to stir that pot . . . I think in that area they’reprepared to stand around in wet sneakers, but they’re not prepared to sink the raft.There is too much political stuff attached now to that industry . . . Registry Agentsare too politically important (ADM).

Even though Service Alberta staff felt the Registry Agent model was out-dated, theywere wary of the implications of reforming the private delivery system:

That model is 1993–94. It’s old and things have changed and that model hasn’t.We’re going to have a lot of fun with that one. You can tell how hesitant I amthere (Executive Director).

Political opposition to reforming the privatized delivery system reflected an ongoingideological commitment to outsourcing:

[Premier Klein’s] phrase was: “Government shouldn’t be in the business, we’regetting out of the business of doing business”, or whatever his phrase was there,

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and outsourcing those services. Registry Agents were the first example of that, soyeah I think it had a huge impact. Registry Agents were always seen as thepotential vehicle for many of the in-person services. To expand the kind ofservices they were providing to include . . . all the other things that people werelooking for (former Alberta ADM).

The outsourcing that occurred early in Alberta’s NPM reforms thus reflected anideology the executive was unwilling to abandon. Despite the goal of creating govern-ment shopfronts and offering services in telephone and web modes, at the time ofwriting there were only two Service Alberta shopfronts, located in Alberta’s majorcities, while the vast bulk of service delivery is still carried out by outsourced RegistryAgents, with government websites acting as a ‘gateway’. More will be said about theextent of integration achieved in the next section.

So far we have observed a superficial political commitment to one-stop-shoppingbut little substantive executive support for and significant political resistance to thereform of the outsourced delivery system. This leaves us with a puzzle: why did theGovernment of Alberta initiate integration reforms contrary to its own ideological andadministrative priorities? The next section explores the role of bureaucratic initiativeand bureaucratic politics in the emergence of the Albertan integration agenda.

The Bureaucratic Politics of One-Stop-Shopping

We have seen that bureaucratic behaviour receives limited and mostly negative treat-ment in recent work on post-NPM. Bureaucrats are said to resist changes and tocompete for resources and responsibilities, leading to fragmentation, inefficiency andorganizational inertia. In Alberta however, instead of acting as a source of resistance,bureaucratic politics played a crucial role in driving the adoption of a service integra-tion agenda, for two reasons: a) one window service was a bureaucratic vision forpublic service renewal that served administrative interests; and b) persuading thegovernment to adopt service integration involved deliberate bureaucratic deceptionabout likely program costs and risks.

Bureaucrats authored the Alberta One Window idea and managed to sell it to agovernment uninterested in reforms to service delivery. In developing the One Windowmodel, provincial public servants drew inspiration from federal service integrationinitiatives. In the late 1990s a number of federal officials began promoting the notionof “citizen centred service” as a way to re-energize the public sector and provide a newsource of legitimacy to the public service in the context of the NPM critique ofbureaucracy (Bourgault and Gusella 2001; Howard 2010). They formed the Institutefor Citizen Centred Service that systematically surveyed citizens and used this researchto aggressively promote service integration through one-stop-shops (Dutil et al. 2010).Albertan officials “used a lot of the information from the Institute for Citizen CentredService . . . the whole Citizens First surveys and those kinds of things” (ADM).

Meanwhile, the Albertan political executive had little interest in and few ideas forreform. As one ADM suggested, “[The Klein] Government had only one objective andthat was get out of debt.” Another ADM argued their minister wanted proposals“usually just to save fifteen per cent, I don’t care how you do it”. Even the DeputyMinister responsible for service delivery integration was not interested in reform:

Rethinking Post-NPM Governance

The Deputy [Minister] . . . he’s accountable for service integration but he’s notpassionate about service integration. He’s not passionate about networking or thatkind of community. So as long as it was saving money and he didn’t have to havetoo much to do with it, he didn’t care (Executive Director).

While the constant pressure to save money in the Albertan public service createdconstraints, bureaucrats saw governmental indifference as a window of opportunity topush service integration (cf. Kingdon 1984). Senior public servants pitched one-window delivery as a “win-win” reform that addressed public dissatisfaction aboutservice cuts and fragmentation, while also producing administrative efficiencies byreducing duplication. The following quote from an Assistant Deputy Minister empha-sises the role of the public service in persuading the government of the multiple benefitsof service integration:

Interviewer: When I review the Legislative Hansard I see Minister after Ministerstanding up and using language such as “one-window delivery”.

ADM: Yeah. He’s been indoctrinated by bureaucrats.

I: That one window language came from bureaucrats?

ADM: From the administration, yeah. You know, they were told to find a way tosave money and improve outcomes, and they came back and said, you know, oneof the ways we could do it is [one window service delivery]. And yeah, thosespeaking notes were prepared for them by the administration who’d gone back,taken the challenge on board, found a solution, brought it to the Minister,educated the Minister, and got him or her onside (ADM).

The model apparently fitted so well with government priorities that, according toone Assistant Deputy Minister, the government could not refuse it:

This kind of service integration is self-evident . . . And everybody else is doingone window and this is a really good idea, and just think about how much easier[pause] I mean it is not hard to argue for one window service delivery. Nogovernment worth its salt could look at the opportunity to streamline servicedelivery to its citizens, to reduce cost and eliminate confusion and all of the otherthings and say it’s a bad idea (ADM).

Thus, the idea of one window delivery originated in the bureaucracy, and when thepolitical executive championed service integration, “that was largely because they hadbeen educated about what the opportunities were” (ADM). Even as the one windowmodel was being rolled out, the government, while paying lip-service to integration,took little interest in the actual achievement of objectives: “Well they said the rightthings about one window service, but they didn’t care about reporting on those, theyjust wanted to know how much money we’d saved” (Executive Director).

Of course, these bureaucrats may be exaggerating their importance in serviceintegration, whereas politicians might feel they played a bigger leadership role. Yet

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the story of bureaucratic initiative is given further credibility in a speech by the Ministerof Government Services to the Legislature in 2002. Present in the visitors’ gallery forthe session were bureaucrats from the Ministry, including Wilma Haas, then director ofthe Alberta One Window project. Minister David Coutts gestured to Haas and gave herteam substantial credit for the integration reforms:

In the second row there I see a lady who has been the managing director of theAlberta OneWindow project and has worked very, very diligently with very, verylittle resources but has come up with a phenomenal response to this One Windowconcept, and Service Alberta is a success only because of Wilma Haas and herstaff. Wilma is up on it (Legislative Assembly of Alberta 2002: 503).

To be sure, this ringing ministerial endorsement does not go as far as givingbureaucrats credit for coming up with the idea of one window service, but it doesconfirm the central role of public servants in devising the one-stop-shop reforms.

The win-win promise of service integration is, like many promises to “do more withless” in public administration, the subject of considerable debate and scepticism (Dutilet al. 2010; Pollitt and Bouckaert 2004). It appears the Albertan public servants wereaware from the outset that service integration might not save money. An ExecutiveDirector suggested the win-win theory did not accord with his experience:

. . . you deliver the services and you are able through the economies and staffingand efficiencies of common process to realize a profit which you then directtowards more service integration. That is the theory. Now there isn’t a publicsector shared or integrated service that I know of that has actually been able to dothat (Executive Director).

This is because, at minimum, service integration requires an initial increase infunding to reform administrative systems:

The problem is when you are talking about that level of service delivery tocitizens, it’s huge and it’s expensive. And [governments] want the savings but theinvestment scares the crap out of them. So it’s really hard to do, because itrequires investment in a process (ADM).

In the absence of short-term savings, senior executives learned to sell serviceintegration by persuading politicians that savings were imminent, and also by hidingshort-term costs:

You have to learn to be clear. You have to learn to be logical, frank. You alwayshave to keep in mind what it is that’s driving them and find a way to express whatyou’re saying in terms that align with what’s driving them. Yeah, and you have toable to, you have to find results, and even if they are not big results, they have tobe progressive . . . So you can say to them this is worth it. Don’t run now, we’reon the cusp of a breakthrough. Or you simply distract them with other things andgo about doing it under the radar, which is what we did for a good chunk of years.They were distracted by other things (Executive Director).

Rethinking Post-NPM Governance

This quote helps to explain why a government strongly committed to outsourcingsigned on to a reform agenda requiring re-integration of services into a governmentministry. Bureaucrats exploited the political executive’s indifference and distraction togain endorsement of reforms that conflicted with the government’s ideological agenda.

Not all bureaucrats supported the Service Alberta vision for one window deliveryand shared services. Agencies approached service integration in terms of how it wouldaffect their responsibilities and “were very much concerned about their turf” (ExecutiveDirector). Furthermore, agencies fought over responsibility for service delivery: “Thereseems to have been at that time a bit of a turf war, there was a turf war going on.”According to interviewees, ministries agreed on a consistent principle for integration:“transactional” services involving routine processing of applications or inquiries wouldbe transferred to the one-stop-shop, while “strategic” services requiring specializeddelivery expertise could stay in separate departments. Yet, this led to definitionalpolitics:

They decided that all things transactional would go to Service Alberta while allthings strategic would stay with the Ministry. So then there had to be this definitionof what is transactional and what is strategic. I can’t remember how manyMinistries there were back then but everybody had a different definition for it . . .[W]hat you would see happen was that one Ministry would say their services weretransactional so they will go. Another Ministry would say well these services aren’ttransactional, these are strategic, so those would stay within that Ministry and notgo to Service Alberta. That’s what actually happened (ADM).

In the end, these bureau-political initiatives and struggles have not achieved signif-icant service integration in Alberta. Service Alberta is essentially still a telephone andweb gateway for services provided in the Registry Agent network and other govern-ment agencies. Small transactions like changing an address on a driver’s license stillrequire a physical visit to a Registry Agent. Car registrations and fines can be paidonline, but these transactions are handled through private websites maintained byRegistry Agents (Alberta Motor Association 2013; Alberta Association of RegistryAgents 2013)—the Service Alberta website provides links to these private sites(Service Alberta 2013). Political support for service integration has not improved, asreflected by the decision in 2008 to transfer Service Alberta to a new minister at thebottom of the order cabinet precedence (Legislative Assembly of Alberta 2012). At thetime of writing the ministry was in 15th spot out of 18 (Alberta 2013).

Conclusion

Although scholarly understandings of post-NPM are evolving, this review of key workshighlights an emerging consensus concerning the reassertion of political control andcoordination, as well as the constraining effects of inherited administrative structuresand bureaucratic interests. The findings of the Albertan service integration case studychallenge this consensus on the drivers of post-NPM. They also contribute newunderstandings of the character and role of bureaucratic initiative under conditions ofpolitical hostility and fiscal restraint.

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The emerging theory of post-NPM governance suggests service integration is apolitical response to public disquiet over fragmented service delivery. This may be truein some jurisdictions, but the Albertan case shows the political drivers are not universal.Provincial bureaucrats promoted the integration of transactional services because thereforms served their interests. They were confronted by a political executive committedto using private contractors as the primary vehicle for transactional service delivery,backed up by political rhetoric deriding the inefficiencies of the public sector. They sawthe one-stop-shop as a chance to simultaneously deliver administrative efficiencies andestablish a new rationale for public provision. Viewed this way, post-NPM serviceintegration is a bureaucratic survival strategy. Public servants can use it to construct anew case for centralized government administration and public service provision thatfurthers their interests.

Whether or not politicians and bureaucrats support or oppose post-NPM integrationdepends in large part on the nature of NPM-era decentralization. Where decentraliza-tion involved devolution to public servants through reforms such as agencification andregionalization, bureaucrats have an interest in preserving the status quo against thereassertion of the political executive. On the other hand, in cases where governmentspursued a retrenchment agenda and transferred functions to private contractors,public servants have less cause to support the continuation of NPM-era ar-rangements. These governments probably engage in open criticism of theirpublic services, leading to reduced public service legitimacy, as was the casein Alberta. Administrators operating in these hostile conditions face a survivalimperative to devise and promote new justifications for in-house delivery ofgovernment services.

This point brings us back to Tom Christensen and Per Laegreid’s suggestion thatcontemporary public management is ‘layered’ because post-NPM reforms have notcompletely displaced established practices and structures. This study supportsChristensen and Laegreid’s general observations about ‘hybridity’. Alberta’s pursuitof outsourcing in the 1990s introduced a new set of structures and interests that havebeen very difficult to modify. The government’s subsequent endorsement of an in-house one-stop-shop led to the creation of the Service Alberta gateway and somelimited integration of services. The result is a hybrid system, in which a small numberservices are offered through the one-stop-shop, but the bulk of responsibility fordelivery remains with line ministries and private contractors.

However, this research takes issue with the general assumption amongst post-NPMscholars that bureaucrats resist reforms. Their arguments are a contemporary applica-tion of the long-held view of administrative researchers (and the broader community)that public servants are change-averse. Such views have particular currency inretrenchment-oriented jurisdictions like Alberta, where old tropes about stolid andunimaginative bureaucrats figure prominently in political discourse. Yet it is preciselythese conditions that can produce intense pressure for bureaucratic innovation, becausefinding new sources of legitimacy becomes a matter a survival. Retrenchment-orientated jurisdictions can also produce greater space for bureaucratic initiative be-cause political executives are focused on outsourcing and have low expectations forgovernment agencies. These governments have few specific reform prescriptions forpublic organizations and may be indifferent to bureaucratic activity so long as itdelivers on key retrenchment objectives such as budget cutting.

Rethinking Post-NPM Governance

As suggested above, the notion that bureaucrats are opposed to reform, invested inestablished procedures, and favour organizational fragmentation was present in aca-demic literature long before the emergence of the new public management and post-NPM. Such ideas find expression in early concepts of administrative theory such as the“bureaucratic personality” (Merton 1940) and “instrumental rationality” (Weber 1968).Subsequent studies of “bureaucratic politics” affirm the view that public servants applynarrow organizational perspectives to problems and pursue their own interests in acompetitive game of inter-agency rivalry (Allison 1971; Farazmand 2009; Riggs 1988).These well-established theories were developed to capture the pathologies of bureau-cratic behaviour during a period of relentless administrative expansion, and in an era ofpolitical dependence on public bureaucracy for advice and implementation. Yet, newpublic management reforms have irrevocably altered the landscape of political-bureaucratic relations, in many cases undermining the capacity of and incentive forpublic servants to stall reforms and promote parochial interests (Aucoin 1995). Whilethe theory of post-NPM governance paints politicians as instigators of a contemporaryrevival in central government leadership and coordination, evidence from recent studiesof political leadership in Western democracies suggest political executives are increas-ingly constrained by the short term imperatives of constant media attention and theperpetual campaign cycle (Kane and Patapan 2012). In this context, unelected admin-istrators may well have greater capability, space and incentive to engage in a search forbold new ideas for public service delivery. Thus, to correctly diagnose the current stateof public service delivery along with the factors that facilitate and hamper keyadministrative reforms, we need to rethink the existing theory of post-NPM governanceand give greater attention to the positive reform efforts of bureaucrats.

Acknowledgments The author thanks Juanita Elias, Dennis Grube, John Kane, John Langford, RodRhodes, Jeffrey Roy, Jason Sharman, Pat Weller, and Wes Widmaier for their comments. Responsibility forall errors and omissions rests with the author. The author gratefully acknowledges the research assistanceprovided by Geoff Braun in connection with field interviews and literature reviews. The Social Sciences andHumanities Research Council of Canada provided support for this research.

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Cosmo Howard Dr Cosmo Howard is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Government and InternationalRelations at Griffith University. His current research interests include administrative theory, public manage-ment reform and the politics of official statistics.

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