Disentangling the separate and combined effects of privatization and cooperation on local government service delivery

Inter‐municipal cooperation is often regarded as an alternative to privatizing local public services. But cooperation and privatization can also be combined into a dual reform package in which several municipalities jointly issue contracts relating to multiple jurisdictions. Evaluation of these mixed cooperation‐privatization reforms rests on disentangling the separate and combined effects of each strategy. This we undertake for the case of solid waste collection in Catalonia, using environmental protection as our focal performance standard. Drawing on two waves of data (for 2000 and 2019) for 186 municipalities that together use all four combinations of public, private, single and cooperative service delivery, we show that superior environmental performance was initially confined to conventional cooperations involving only public production. But latterly, any form of cooperation, using public or private production, resulted in significant gains. This reinforces the need for evaluators to isolate the “active ingredient” in composite reforms.