Citizen, State & Civil Society - the future delivery of public services - invitation only

This roundtable seminar will be jointly held with ESRC and will feature presentations of the following work:

Citizen, State & Society

Gerry Stoker: Motivation, Behaviour and the Future of Public Services

This paper asks how we can use new understandings from cognitive psychology and neuroscience to inform the way we design and deliver public services in the future.

Hartley Dean: What are the Social Implications of Meeting New Risks? Personal responsibilities versus social citizenship

This essay first discusses the rise and fall of the social citizenship ideal.

Peter Taylor-Gooby: Social Inequality

A major theme in public service reform is user empowerment through greater opportunities for choice between alternative providers.  This paper raises issues for inequality, since user groups differ markedly in resources and cultural capital. 

Pete Alcock: What Are Our Future Sources of Welfare: a New Role for the Third Sector?

There is a widely-held view that welfare services in the future will be delivered by a mixed economy. This paper discusses the history of third sector involvement in the delivery of public services.

Annabelle Lever: Democracy, Deliberation and Public Service Reform

This paper discusses the tensions between two types of public service reform, the ‘deliberative model’ and the ‘technocratic model’, through a case study of the experience of NICE in using qualitative evidence from service users.

Polly Vizard: Towards a new model of public services for 21st century Britain: Background paper on the capability approach and rights-based approaches (including human rights)

This paper scopes out the role that (1) the capability approach and (2) rights-based approaches (including the idea of human rights) can play in the development of a new model of public services that reflects long-term changes in expectations and technology, demographic trends, economic and structural change, and fiscal pressures. 

Future Delivery of Public Services

Christopher Hood: Reflections on Public Service Reform in a Cold Fiscal Climate

There are historical precedents for significant publicâ€�sector reforms in conditions of fiscal stringency, and this paper briefly sketches out and assesses three broad reform strategies for public services in such conditions.

Rebecca Allen and Simon Burgess: The Future of Competition in Education

This essay sets out the fundamental issues that school reform has to deal with. It then briefly reviews the evidence for the UK and beyond about the effects of competition on key policy outcomes.

Deborah Wilson: Targets- and Rankings-based Accountability Mechanisms

This paper reviews the evidence on the effects of ‘managing by numbers’ across health and education. It describes the ways performance indicators can be employed and the responses that may result. It also describes explains the different types of PIs and their limitations.

The researchers will briefly present their papers, and then open it up to floor for discussion.