Search

This article explores the regulation of municipally owned water plants in the United States, with a focus on providing adequate service and fair rates to the public. It acknowledges the difficulties faced by small utilities in meeting regulatory requirements and maintaining accurate records. The article concludes by discussing the role of state commissions in monitoring compliance and improving service quality. It argues for the necessity of a central regulatory body to assist municipalities in maintaining proper accounting practices and determining equitable rates, highlighting the benefits of state regulation in ensuring high standards of service and fair rates for consumers. [Extracted from the article]

Good quality information is a public utility: the rich and powerful will always have access to what they need to know, but poor people do not. Indeed, increasing inequalities in access to decent information underlie other more obvious inequalities. Bad information does not respect borders and yet democracy depends on informed citizens. The case for public intervention in what used to be called broadcasting, now including digital media—but which needs to be thought of as a public information space—is at a tipping point. This collection of essays sets out these vital challenges and offers some innovative solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Derecho Penal y Criminologia is the property of Universidad Externado de Colombia, Departamento de Derecho Penal y Criminologia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Nuevo Foro Penal is the property of Universidad EAFIT and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Purpose: The purpose of the article is to attempt to adapt the Balanced Scorecard to public utility transport companies operating under the public budget formula, i.e. those whose founders and owners are 100% or majority local governments. Design/methodology/approach: Balanced score card, analysis of the needs of the public transport services market. Findings: The need to adapt to the specificity of public utility transport companies operating under the public budget formula, i.e. those whose founders and owners are 100% or majority local governments. Research limitations/implications: A detailed analysis of strategic goals and actions in necessary. Originality/value: A new approach to the traditional strategic analysis tool. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of an ever growing interest upon environmental protection issue, the study comprises an analyze of the organization and the effectiveness of the public sanitation services both at a union and a national level, starting from the premises of the two dedicated principles: the priority of selective waste collection and the principle „Pay-as-you-throw“, a practical application of a more general „the polluter pays“ principle. Both of these are going to be analyzed from a double perspective: the EU Law (Directive 2008/98/EC) and EU recommendations, on one side, the national law (Law no. 51/2006 of community services of public utilities, GEO no. 92/2021 regarding the waste regime, Law no. 101/2006 of the public sanitation services, Framework Regulation of the public sanitation services etc.), on the other. As this study will show, EU and national law are abundant in regulations determining and detailing these two principles: thus, the theory seems to be clear. These principles are no longer that clear when it comes to their concrete application, due to the lack of detailed rules. The selective waste collection remains, in fact, a simple wish, mostly because the users of the public sanitation service have not received previous proper instruction in this regard, as there are no concrete rules related to how to classify a waste into one of the paper/plastic and metal/glass/biodegradable categories. But also „The polluter pays“ principle is rather an illusion than a reality; even though national laws force its implementation, there are plenty of hurdles in applying it: the inadequate use of the available instruments that determines the waste produced by each individual, or to the difficulties related to condominiums. The article focuses on the analysis of all of these acute issues, taking into account two factual examples -- waste management in the Metropolitan Area of Cluj and Bucharest, -- proposing solutions attempting to ease the implementation of these two key principles concerning public sanitation services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the paper is to determine the relevance of services for public transport undertakings in terms of externalities. The article develops a methodology for researching and evaluating the quality of public utility services and the degree of saturation of the use of environmentally friendly modern technologies in the field of local public transport. Multi-criteria evaluation was used to assess the degree of quality of utility service delivery systems in the field of local public transport. The article is based on the experience of scientific partners from the University of Economics in Kraków and the University of Economics in Bratislava, using the examples of Poland and Slovakia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of South Architecture / Nanfang Jianzhu is the property of South Architecture Editorial Office and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The administration of the domiciliary public utility companies must ensure compliance with their demand, ensuring the available financial resources cover the costs and achieve dividends for owners. This paper proposes a methodology for measure the efficiency of domestic utility companies in Colombia through a stochastic frontier, considering information from 2014 to 2018 from 44 companies, showing an efficiency ranking of firms, the result shows company's resource efficiency rate is 39%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The text deals with the definition of public services and their scope in Belarus and Poland. As a result of the conducted research, it was found that it is difficult to accept one criterion indicating that the given services are public. A permanent criterion of non-payment for the services provided cannot be accepted, as there are public services which are paid for. A wide group of beneficiaries may indicate that it is a service or product of general interest. A comparison of the scope and services of public utility in Belarus and in Poland shows their wider scope present in Belarus. The aim of the study is to investigate: − whether the scope of public utility has evolved in the last thirty years, after the political transformation that took place in Poland and Belarus, − what scope of public utility services is provided by the public administration in Poland and Belarus, − whether services of general interest can be provided by private entrepreneurs in these two States. Conducting the research required the use of a comparative research method aimed at comparing the legal regulations regarding the conduct of activities in the field of public utility in Poland and in Belarus. The historical-legal method was also used to show the evolution of the scope of public utility services through the change of legal regulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The analysis presented here concerns the transformation of rural settlement in a Community Development Block of Paschim Bardhaman district (Salanpur) of Indian States of West Bengal. The research analysis established different degrees of transformation in the study area. Spatial, demographic, economic, and socio-cultural parameters are included for the analysis of settlement transformation. Transformation in Rural settlement system and its application on future transformation and planning purpose have not been adequately deliberated in the earlier studies of rural settlement. Data for this investigation mainly procured from various official records and a semi-structured (contained both closed and open ended questions) questionnaire survey. Various statistical methods like Rural Residential Percentage, Settlement Expansion Index, Nearest Neighbor Statistics (RN = Nearest Neighbor Index), etc. are employed for analysis. Grounded on all the major findings that reveal the rural settlement of Salanpur have been gradually transforming into an urban settlement and it might be predicted that in future Salanpur may emerge as a new urban centre in Paschim Bardhaman District. So far, the main driving forces behind this transformation are the increasing settlement expansion, increasing population density, improvement in public utility services; building plan and structure, followed by the changing socio-cultural structure in the study area. Rural settlement transformation has many positive impacts on the study area. But the author argued that the transformation of the rural settlement is not comprehensive in the development aspect as the government is not able to provide adequate services and amenities to every rural household and increasing built up area has many adverse effects on ecology and the environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista de Ciencias Sociales (13159518) is the property of Revista de Ciencias Sociales de la Universidad del Zulia Venezuela and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Concept of partnership between public and private entities, commonly addressed as »Public private partnership« or PPP, have spread all over the world as an innovative model to deliver public services and to help established public infra-structure; as railways and roads, water supply facilities and sewerage systems, other communal services and public infrastructure, even building and managing hospitals, elderly homes, etc. In order to serve the public interest, PPP projects should be based upon a negotiated allocation of risk, which means that project risks should be distributed equaly between the partners. However, issues of transparency, good governance and public accountability have been at risk in the process. Through the Portuguese case of PPP involving the reward contract for the construction and maintenance of highways, the argument for the need of transparent and readable information is presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of College of The Great Imam University is the property of Republic of Iraq Ministry of Higher Education & Scientific Research (MOHESR) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Since the 1990s, the debate on the privatization of public utility services has been gaining momentum in Brazil, whether due to internal or external political pressure, as well as the interest of private agents. The Brazilian Postal and Telegraph Company (ECT) is the largest provider of logistics services in the country and has been the subject of privatization programs promoted by most governments over the past thirty years. The argument about the need to privatize the company is mixed with economic, administrative, political and ideological arguments, which, depending on the Brazilian political and economic situation, gain more or less strength. The aim of this article is to update the discussion on the privatization of ECT, highlighting its political conflicts, economic interests and the ideological aspects of the narratives that advance towards the privatization of the Brazilian state-owned logistics services. In addition, we seek to emphasize the social role of ECT in the Brazilian territory, having as an emphatic time frame the 1990s, 2000s and 2010, which is when, in fact, discussions about privatizing the company began. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Esferas is the property of Esferas and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

There was a time when it was said that the commanding height of Indian economy will be with the public sector. But with gradual deterioration in the functioning of government owned public utilities, increasing public chaos and demand for better public utility services necessitated revolutionary change in state owned enterprises and boards. This paper throws light upon the exigency to undertake revolutionary change in DJB (Delhi Jal Board) to circumvent public misery and outcry. It expresses the need to commence a major change that encompasses altering internal policies, procedures, structure, mindset as well as the mission and vision of the organisation. Accordingly, this paper attempts to substantiate the obligatory high level change through research conducted on TPDDL (Tata Power Delhi Distribution Limited) that was transformed on PPP (public-privatepartnership) basis. It also exhibits the various forces operating in the environment that incessantly drive towards a comprehensive change, through Kurt Lewin model of change. Consequently, it addresses the problems of water scarcity and mismanagement. Besides, it also updates about the small projects or initiatives by DJB to deal with the growing needs of water in Delhi. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Gestion et Management Public is the property of Association Internationale de Recherche en Management Public (AIRMAP) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

A public service franchise is a special privilege to do certain things that is conferred by the government on an individual or a company. It also refers to the body that is responsible for carrying out the service. This body may be an administration, a local authority, a public institution or a private company that has been entrusted with a public service mission. In the latter case, the public service mission may take the form of a franchise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study questions the accountability relationship between one Municipality and its different Local Public Utilities (LPUs). On the basis of a case study built on documental analysis and on 21 in-depth interviews with key public officials, top managers and policymakers, a less scholastic view of accountability is proposed based on the consideration of different accountability mechanisms. The case study confirms that corporate governance, albeit central, is only one of the mechanisms available to the municipality to make the LPUs accountable. The dependence on the financial resources and the political salience of the specific public service emerge as factors impacting on the intensity of the accountability relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Ciência & Trópico (03042685) is the property of Fundacao Joaquim Nabuco and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The present research proposes an analysis of the efficiency of public waste management services, considering the determination of the technical and allocative efficiency of some administrative units in the county of Galați, with responsibilities in this respect. The empirical analysis presupposed the collection of a relevant data set from 2018 in point of: number of households, collection ratio, fee/inhabitant/month, surface and average waste amount generated per year (tons). Considering the analysis at the level of 2018 has the argument the fact that 2018 was the final year when the management of the waste services was the responsibility of the local public administration, as in 2019 the transfer of inventory and competence regarding the waste management service was made from the administrative units to the association of Waste Intercommunity Development Galați. In the present research we resorted to the Data Envelopment Analysis, the CCR model oriented towards input data, as it represents a robust tool for the comparative analysis technique. The results of this analysis are relevant, as it confers municipalities a support to evaluate the efficiency of waste collection programs at the level of each administrative unit under analysis, so that to generate solutions to increase the efficiency of waste collection systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The donation list contains a lot of information, and the way it is published will affect the development of cooperation. This article incorporates comments and individuals' tolerance of their own reputation evaluation into public goods game and then explores the influence of list retention time on cooperation. Evolutionary results show that introducing the time factor into the donation list will attract more public donations. Furthermore, by putting a small percentage of players on the list, more players' participation in public services can be leveraged. Compared with the immediate announcement, a relatively large list retention time not only inspires people's enthusiasm for donation but also achieves a higher level of cooperation. Historical information and diffusion probability have something to do with cooperation. Our research helps organizers to effectively solve the dilemma of insufficient public participation in public utilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes the facility of protection of rights in the public utility market. The main task is to assess the effectiveness of the existing legal approach to solving this problem in the context of preventing poverty of all market participants - consumers, service providers and investors on the principle of «Leave no one aside», reflected in the UN Global Sustainable Development Goals for the period 2015-2030. The study covers three components of the facility for protecting public utilities market participants in the public utilities market: prevention of potential poverty, reduction of existing poverty and compensation to the injured party in a case of tort that exacerbates or threatens to exacerbate its poverty. The analysis is based on official statistical information on the activities of the public utilities sector. Operational information of public utility service providers regarding certain indicators of their activity in the work was not studied. This approach narrows the empirical basis of the study, but at the present stage in the context of different rates of implementation of changes in regions, sectors and at the level of individual entities, as well as lack of uniformity in the structure of indicators published by service providers, analysis allows to identify «bottlenecks» of legal regulation, which are systemic in nature and largely independent of the subjective factor. The analysis allowed to determine the positive impact of targeted subsidies on the effectiveness of the facility of the utilities market participants protection in the context of poverty alleviation, as well as factors that reduce this efficiency, in particular, targeted inconsistency of the legal model of the market, accounting for services and liability for breach of contract for their payment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic has put pressure on essential public services. While much of the economy has been shut down, essential public services have continued. Using professional experience, publicly available information, and interviews with two municipal utility managers, we evaluate the challenges presented to municipal utility services by the COVID-19 pandemic and explore some of the responses by utilities to the pandemic. Specifically, we focus on the strategies utilities have used to keep employees safe from the virus and plans for workforce shortages. One important strategy we identify is reliance on mutual aid agreements, where utilities agree to send staff and equipment to other utilities in times of crisis. We also explore the role of a municipal utility association in coordinating response. The case of utility response to COVID-19 carries important potential implications for both public administration practice and research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do disruptions in basic public service delivery shape people's perceptions of politicians? We offer evidence from the July 2012 blackout in India, the largest in human history. Using data from the India Human Development Survey, we compare confidence in politicians between households that were surveyed during the outage and affected by it (treatment) and only days before it (control). Balance statistics show that the treatment and control groups are statistically indistinguishable, and further tests indicate that there was no disturbance to the pattern of surveying. Far from undermining public confidence in politicians, the outage increased it, as citizens reacted to the anxiety created by the crisis. The implications are normatively troubling, as politicians seem to have reaped benefits from disruptions in public service delivery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Local Affairs Administration established by local selfgovernments in the 2016-2019period calls for tenders more and more frequently. Beside public utility companies founded by local selfgovernment units there is an increasing number of the so called “other enterprises” taking part in the bidding. The aim of the authors was to determine at what prices the Local Affairs Administration concluded agreements with the said enterprises that participated in the public bidding. The authors came to relevant findings as they had an insight in the agreements concluded between the Local Affairs Administration and the bidders in the 2017-2019 period. Accordingly, the authors` contribution is in finding that following calling for tenders and tender procedures agreements between the Local Affairs Administration and bidders are concluded at prices that are lower than in case of direct bargaining between the Local Affairs Administration and public utility companies. That is, conducting tender procedures is beneficial to the Local Affairs Administration as less money of taxpayers is spent on the same public utility service. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Benchmarking is a managerial tool aimed at increasing internal and external organizational performance, initially used in the private sector and imported by the public sector in the mid 90s. Although the debate about the challenges and shortcuts of using benchmarking for assessing public agencies performance is still open and vivid in the academic community, the present paper argues for the undoubted net benefits of applying such a tool in the public services sector (with a particular emphasis on public utilities) in terms of stimulating an increased performance, accountability and transparency of local public authorities benchmarked for their performances in service delivery. The comparative analysis between the benchmarking models: the UK top - down approach, the Swedish voluntary benchmarking and the Romanian incomplete benchmarking started as an independent, external monitoring exercise - provides the grounds for a better understanding of the rationale and evolution of benchmarking processes when applied to various segments of the public sector. The lessons learned, common traits and well as differences between the three case studies are illustrative both for the usefulness of the managerial tool, but also for the challenging dynamics that benchmarking processes imply in particular administrative, social, economical and cultural contexts [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The economy is on the verge of a seismic, tech-driven shift. Digitization is new big thing. Digital India is dream project of the Government of India, aiming to deliver digital utility services to the rural areas of the country. The Government has formulated tech driven Common Service Centers (CSCs) to offer assisted access of e-services to citizens with a focus on enhancing e-governance. Apart from delivering essential government and public utility services, CSCs also deliver a range of social welfare schemes, financial services, education and skill development courses, healthcare, agriculture services and digital literacy. CSCs promote rural entrepreneurship and includes plethora of financially inclusive services. Insurance sector has seen a paradigm shift having implemented this new kiosk based sales channel. From motor to rural to health, the service of providing indemnity has reached to the remote zones of our country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Basra Studies Journal is the property of Republic of Iraq Ministry of Higher Education & Scientific Research (MOHESR) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Objectives: To seek for the optimum economic model for public utility services in the sector of municipal waste management; to present the results of studies regarding the efficiency of companies in the sector of management of municipal waste and the systems that such companies function within. Research Design & Methods: Multi-criterion rankings with the use of synthetic variable, the structure of which has been based on zeroed unitarisation (method of zeroed unitarisation - MZU). Owing to general financial data, technical and operational data, as well as output data, it was possible to determine rankings of effectiveness for companies in the system of municipal waste management and communes. What is more, a correlation diagram was created - the dependency between the aggregated effectiveness of companies and the aggregated effectiveness of waste management in communes. Findings: Communes which entrust municipal companies with management of an integrated system for municipal waste management or/and its individual chains feature more properties of operating, economic, and financial effectiveness within the scope of management of municipal waste. Implications / Recommendations: It is demonstrated that communes which entrust municipal companies with management of an integrated system for municipal waste management - or/and its individual chains - feature more properties of operating, economic, and financial effectiveness within the scope of the management of municipal waste. Contribution / Value Added: Further extended research into the organisation and management of the municipal waste management system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Luis Alberto Urrea's Across the Wire: Life and Hard Times on the Mexican Border (1993) provides a harrowing perspective on the struggles of a group of mainly indigenous refugees and migrants who live in one of Tijuana's many colonias—informal settlements with no utilities or public services—where they barely survive by picking trash. Written from notes that Urrea compiled while he was a translator for Baptist missionaries from 1978 to 1982 and then again in the 1990s, Across the Wire is deeply indebted to colonial modes of representation that have characterised Western anthropological knowledge production, and specifically ethnographic writing, from its inception. The memoir cum ethnographic work cum journalistic account aims to call attention to the hardships that refugees in Tijuana face and elicit sympathy for their plight. Yet, despite Urrea's intention to humanise his subjects, Across the Wire depicts them as helpless, in need of outside deliverance, and ultimately inferior to Urrea and his missionary crew, reproducing a white saviour narrative that reifies the myth of white, Western superiority. In the process, Across the Wire unwittingly reveals the pernicious workings of white saviourism and illustrates how it is contingent on an exploitative relationship in which the purported "helper" is the actual beneficiary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Utility and homeowner surveys were completed in 2015 to document the number of lead service lines (LSLs) in Canadian utilities, share utilities’ knowledge, and formulate recommendations on LSL management. LSLs represented <1 to 22% of the service line connections in the distribution systems considered (average 23 LSLs/1,000 people). With the exception of two utilities, mostly partial LSL replacements (LSLRs) were conducted by the utilities surveyed; flushing procedures post‐LSLR varied. Considering both surveys, the following recommendations are suggested: improve LSL records by registering the materials on both the public and the private sides after LSLR; harmonize flushing procedures post‐LSLR; develop a collaborative approach between contractors and utility staff to increase awareness, maintain LSL records, and ensure post‐LSLR flushing; combine funding, increased awareness, and provision of contractors to homeowners with fixed costs to increase full LSLRs; and assess the possibility of mandatory LSL detection and full LSLR at the time of house resale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a reprint of the article "Water and Politics in Coastal California: The Diablo Canyon Experience," by K.N. Lee, which appeared in the August 1973 issue of "Public Affairs Report." It discusses the various issues involved in the emergence of public utilities as major problems of public policy and cause of environmental crisis.

Under China’s current fiscal policies and inter-governmental relations, it is a significant challenge to finance and deliver public services across jurisdictions. This challenge was met in the Pearl River Delta region in southern China with a collaborative governance approach. Directives from higher-level governments and horizontal inter-city fiscal arrangements were successfully combined to deliver public services. Effective networks should be developed to improve co-ordination and collaboration in delivering cross-jurisdictional public services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Measuring progress toward water and sanitation provision requires a sharper focus on intranational disparity in access. This paper analyses access levels to electricity, drinking water and sanitation in Saudi Arabia's thirteen provinces from an equity perspective. Substantial disparity in access to piped water and sewerage services exists across the provinces. While access to national electricity grid slightly varies from 98.6% of dwellings in the Eastern province to 95.3 in Hail province, the percentage of dwellings connected to piped water ranged from only 10% in Al-Baha province to 90.1% in the Eastern province. Only 3.6% and 5.0% of dwellings in Al-Baha and Najran provinces respectively were connected to public sewer systems, compared with 77.4% in the Eastern province. The paper concludes that key to more equitable delivery of basic public services in Saudi Arabia is to decentralize infrastructure development to provincial and municipal governments, formulate and implement water and sanitation policies with an emphasis on expanding coverage in the underserved regions and to build decentralized sewer systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global water resources are subject to increasing supply constraints. We respond by exploring how novel public sector performance reporting can service public accountability. Here our focus is an exploration of the drivers and utility of a unique ‘sustainability’-focused, publicly disclosed, performance reporting initiative undertaken by a water agency in Australia. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with a range of individuals from 2013 to 2014. A disclosure index was also constructed to assess the quality of the disclosures. While the key purpose of the reports was to provide managerial accountability with intra-governmental stakeholders, they were also drawn on to serve a secondary public accountability purpose with external stakeholders. We argue that the prioritisation of internal stakeholders could threaten utility for public accountability purposes. However, in this case, the reports were also found to be largely relevant to the general public. The study demonstrates that reporting developed for managerial accountability purposes can be designed and targeted also to contribute usefully to ancillary public accountability objectives. Our engagement with the public sector to explore the role and effectiveness of novel reporting strategies in support of sustainability and accountability objectives is topical, and contributes to understanding potential solutions in other contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Direito da Cidade is the property of Editora da Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (EdUERJ) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Abstract: Public value theory has become a hot topic in public administration research, but its proponents have long recognised difficulties in empirically testing the theory's central propositions. There has been a lack of clarity about how to measure the extent to which organisations are generating public value, which has rendered researchers unable to quantitatively study the causes, consequences and correlates of public value. The current study systematically reviews the growing literature on public value measurement to identify, evaluate, and synthesise available measures. Through a qualitative synthesis of the themes present in published measures, we identify four key components for measuring public value that appear to be important across a range of policy and national contexts. Our review identifies a promising framework that could be used to structure a comprehensive measure of public value and, in doing so, provides a means to progress theoretical development and testing of the public value approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The quality management in the Municipal Sports Services is embedded in the servuction provided to the citizens, which are their internal customers who determine the quality improvement ensuring competitiveness with excellence criteria. The Model of the European Foundation for Quality Management enables the evaluation of organization progress towards achieving quality goals, from a structured, measurable and comparable methodology. The aim is to carry out a diagnosis of the level of implementation of quality in the Municipal Sports Services of the Region of Murcia, Spain. The sample of 287 workers of 30 sports services gets a high level of reliability at all scales, with a coefficient of variation of .985 (range .810-.943). The score in the criteria of Policy and Strategy, People Management, Alliances and Resources, Processes and People Results were significantly higher (p < .05) in the Municipalities with more than 25,000 inhabitants when compared with those less than 10,000 and with those from 10,000 to 25,000 inhabitants obtaining global ratings of 571 points, those less than 10,000, 590 points those from 10,000 to 25,000 and those higher than 25,000 reach 636, having a good level of quality in relation to the scale that determines the model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Governments emerged as “international public shareholders” when publicly-owned utilities developed into some of the world's largest multinationals. This article enquires whether these international public shareholders maintain their public values when operating abroad. Taking a public values approach, we assess whether public values were transferred across borders focusing on five core dimensions: financial, economic, social, technical and environmental. We analyze the internationalization activities of two large public utilities, Vattenfall and Endesa - strategically selected for representing strong and weak public values – in their major markets in Europe and Latin America. We find that, irrespective of the relative strength of the initial public values legacy of the public utility, the lure of financial success trumped other competing objectives associated with the public shareholder abroad. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]