Impacts of joint municipal agencification on the democratic governance of waste management

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1108/IJPSM-05-2021-0114
• Published date: 25 April 2022
• Date: 25 April 2022
• Pages: 533-548
• Subject Matter: Public policy & environmental management,Politics,Public adminstration & management
• Author: Pekka Valkama,Harald Torsteinsen,Pekka Kettunen

Impacts of joint municipal

agencification on the democratic

governance of waste management

Pekka Valkama

School of Management, University of Vaasa, Vaasa, Finland

Harald Torsteinsen

Department of Social Sciences, UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Campus

Harstad, Harstad, Norway, and

Pekka Kettunen

Faculty of Management and Business, University of Tampere, Tampere, Finland

Abstract

Purpose –The study examines how introducing joint municipal arm’s length bodies (ALBs) into municipal

waste management has influenced the preconditions of democratic governance.

Design/methodology/approach –The authors describe and explain the democratic implications of joint

municipal agencification by reviewing the perspectives of representative and participative democracy.

Through this approach, the authors apply the exit–voice framework developed by Albert Hirschman to

highlight the potential roles and rights of citizens. This research includes country case studies of Finland and

Norway. The authors analyse and systematize Finnish and Norwegian waste and organizational policies by

reviewing national regulatory documents, commentaries and guidance materials to identify the fundamental

missions and institutional traditions of the alternative organizational forms of joint ALBs.

Findings –The study findings highlight that joint agencification has an adverse effect on the democratic

governance of waste management policy and services even though these are public monopoly services. They

also demonstrate that all joint municipal ALBs limit the classic elements of representative democracy in

general, and that private-law ALBs limit residents’rights to influence and participate.

Originality/value –This study contributes to local public management studies by applying Hirschman’s

theory to comparative reviews of joint agencification and ALBs. It revealed the similarities and differences

between the different organizational forms of joint ALBs applied in Finland and Norway. It also demonstrated

how the democratic rights of residents depend on how municipalities collaborate.

Keywords Arm’s length body, Joint agencification, Municipal waste management, Democratic governance,

Exit, Voice

Paper type Research paper

Introduction

In western democracies, municipal governance is largely based on the principle of

representative democracy, according to which citizens rule themselves through their elected

representatives. This model is realized through local elections, through which the people

appoint their representatives to a popular assembly, the local council, mandated to make the

collective decisions of local communities. In addition, most democracies supplement their

representative, democratic institutions with participatory arrangements, operating between

or across elections, thus providing opportunities for local residents to take initiatives and

Impacts of joint

municipal

agencification

533

© Pekka Valkama, Harald Torsteinsen and Pekka Kettunen. Published by Emerald Publishing Limited.

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Received 10 May 2021

Revised 6 October 2021

6 January 2022

28 February 2022

Accepted 1 March 2022

International Journal of Public

Sector Management

Vol. 35 No. 5, 2022

pp. 533-548

Emerald Publishing Limited

0951-3558

DOI 10.1108/IJPSM-05-2021-0114

play an active part in municipal affairs. However, during the last 20–25 years, widespread

agencification has increasingly become a challenge to traditional democratic governance.

Agencification occurs when a single municipality creates an autonomous or

semi-autonomous functional organization, or when several municipalities cooperate to

establish such an entity, a process we call joint agencification. Joint municipal agencification

begins by clarifying whether inter-municipal collaboration is compulsory, and whether

municipalities want to collaborate. Municipalities then have to choose with whom to

collaborate. Collaborating partners must also select which organizational form they want for

their joint body (Verhoest, 2013). Joint bodies have many names and many forms in public

management literature (Lane, 2009), but here we refer to them as joint arm’s length bodies

(ALBs) (van Genugten et al., 2020;Wood, 2015). Finally, collaborative municipalities must

develop a founding agreement for their new joint ALB, which defines the ALB’s autonomy,

financial basis and other features.

This article explores the democratic impacts of joint agencification by focusing on

municipal waste management (MWM) of household and similar waste. As an operational

process, MWM consists of waste collection, treatment and disposal. MWM has a long history

as a local public service, and originally aimed to solve public health problems in urban areas.

Today, MWM has a wide environmental focus. It is a policyarea extensively regulated by EU

legislation and follows the self-sufficiency principle that waste should be handled as close as

possible to its origin (Antionoli and Massarutto, 2012). This aligns with the European Charter

of Local Self-Government (ECLSG, 1985), which mandates that, in general, public duties

should preferably be exercised by the authorities closest to the residents, i.e. the local

government. However, municipalities have increasingly applied joint agencification to their

MWM services, while volumes of waste have steadily grown.

Argento et al. (2010) studied the local public–public collaboration and externalization of

municipal waste disposal in Italy and Sweden and concluded that agencification had

progressed, because local policy-makers aimed to increase the autonomy of service units so

that they could operate more like business enterprises. This study addresses the lack of cross-

country comparative research (Voorn and van Genugten, 2021) and the need for further

studies of the challenges facing the democratic governance of municipal ALBs called for by

van Genugten et al. (2020).

Thus, our research question is:

RQ1. How does introducing joint municipal ALBs into MWM influence the preconditions

of democratic governance?

We review and compare the democratic implications of both public- and private-law joint

ALBs by focusing on the related issues of representative and participatory democracy. We

look at two country case studies and investigate how the joint agencification of MWM

services conditions the democratic governance of waste management agencies in Finland and

Norway. Our study examines similar system designs in two Nordic countries in which

democratic, multifunctional, and autonomous local governments provide the bulk of public

welfare services, but which differ in terms of EU membership and the degree of neoliberal

influence on public service provision. The comparative aspects of our country cases provide

wider perspectives than a single country case study and highlight the contextual factors and

varying features of joint agencification and ALBs (Cf. Denters and Mossberger, 2006). The

analyses contribute to local public management and local self-government studies by

highlighting the diverse use and governance differences of alternative joint agencies that

have their own legal personalities (Klausen and Winsvold, 2021).

The article proceeds as follows. After the introduction, we describe the democratic

character of a municipality and the relationship between the citizens and their local

government, from the perspectives of representative and participative democracy. We then

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