Journal
SOCIAL SCIENCE & MEDICINE
Volume 273, Issue -, Pages -Publisher
PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD
DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2021.113744
Keywords
Inter municipal cooperation; Inter-organisational cooperation; Asymmetry; Power; Service delivery agreements; Relative size; Service quality; Autonomy
Funding
- University of Agder [98454]
- Aust-Agder Development and Knowledge Fund [2013/3148-51]
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For relatively smaller partner municipalities, asymmetry in size is likely to result in improved service quality but at the cost of losing decision-making autonomy to the host. Conversely, for relatively larger host municipalities, this asymmetry may negatively impact service quality, but has no effect on decision-making autonomy.
Throughout Europe, local health services are increasingly being provided through various forms of intermunicipal cooperation (IMC). One of the most common forms of IMC is when small municipalities delegate the operational responsibility for providing health services to a larger host municipality. However, despite the size asymmetry usually inherent in this type of IMC, this aspect has largely been neglected in the existing literature, which mainly focuses on the size of individual municipalities. Based on data from 97 partner municipalities and 25 host municipalities in Norway, this study examines how varying degrees of size asymmetry between them affect the perceived service quality and loss of autonomy resulting from IMC in health services. From the perspective of the relatively smaller partner municipalities, the results suggest that these are likely to benefit greatly from size asymmetry in terms of improved service quality, although this would appear to be at the expense of losing decision-making autonomy to their host. However, from the perspective of the relatively larger hosts municipalities, this type of asymmetry is likely to affect service quality negatively while having no effect on decision-making autonomy.
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