Abstract
Swiss municipalities are being stretched to their limits. In the years from 1995 to 1997, 32% of all Swiss municipalities closed with a deficit. In response to this situation, numerous reforms have been introduced since the start of the 1990s in order to improve the performance capability of the municipalities. Aside from intermunicipal cooperation, New Public Management (NPM) is the reform project that is currently being discussed most in the Swiss municipalities. Recent data shows that every fourth municipality has already taken first steps with NPM. Many kinds of activities are understood as being encompassed by NPM, even when not all aspects of NPM are implemented. Only one fifth of the municipalities that have introduced NPM are already working with key elements such as product definitions, performance agreements, and global budgets, which are necessary for an orientation toward output and outcome. In municipalities of less than 1,000 inhabitants NPM is still hardly an issue, while a number of towns with over 10,000 inhabitants are looking into NPM quite intensively. NPM programs are being developed primarily in municipalities that are part of German-speaking Switzerland. Municipalities that offer a wide range of services consider new steering models, such as NPM, far more frequently than those with a narrower range. The financial situation has little influence on whether NPM is introduced.
1. Introduction
The municipalities in Switzerland are widely seen as the nucleus of state and society. It may therefore seem surprising that these political communities based on the inhabitants principle only came into being in the middle of the nineteenth century, when the Swiss Confederation was founded. Compared to other systems of local government, the Swiss form of local authority has proved extremely stable. Although the size of the municipalities varies considerably, and most are very small, there have been no major attempts to merge local authorities in order to standardize them. Between 1848 and 2000, the number of political communities decreased only from 3,203 to 2,899. In the last ten years, there have been significant numbers of mergers in just a few of the 26 cantons (Dafflon, 1998: 125–128). This seems remarkable considering that more than half of the municipalities have less than 1,000 inhabitants (see Table 1). Almost half the Swiss population lives in municipalities with more than 10,000 inhabitants, but only around 4% of the municipalities are this large (Ladner, 1991).
6. Is Switzerland a special case?
Does the extent to which NPM is being introduced in Switzerland indicate that it is a special case, or do developments in Switzerland follow an international trend? In the mid-1990s, Naschold carried out a meta analysis of various local authority reform programs world wide and discovered three trends (Naschold, 1997: 15–48): internal modernization of public administrations involving the elements of performance control, budgeting and human resource management; democratization of the municipalities (opening up decision-making procedures, transfer of public tasks to the municipalities); and stronger market orientation of the municipalities (benchmarking, outsourcing, performance agreements, legal independence and privatization).
