Social organizations have always been taken as the key to adjust the government failure and market failure in the public services purchased by the government. On the other hand, scholars, represented by Salamon, also point out that the government intervention is needed in case of the potential voluntary failure of the social organizations. Anyhow, the norms of research and theoretical framework need to be verified by the actual social contexts to avoid conflicting statements from being supported by the same empirical evidence. In addition, the refinement and revision of theoretical framework should be based on the specific experiences from different countries. The investigations on 6 Government Purchase of Service Contracting (GPSC) cases in 5 different cities in China indicate that regional governments are not only incapable of completely solving the problems leading to ″voluntary failure″ but also make it more complicated. The findings are as follows: First, the major problem for social organizations as contractors is fund insufficiency. This hampers the social organizations from adopting a long-term scheme to achieve public goals and to improve themselves in terms of the unsustainable resource. Nevertheless, the fund for the government cooperative projects is usually fixed and stable i.e., the government does not provide extra support to the contractor for the process-based needs , meanwhile, the contractor could barely get any support from other channels. Second, in the process of carrying out a service project, service targets and contents designed by the contact risk being replaced due to the external changes, and in turn leading to a new particularism. It is difficult to be avoided for both government and the social organizations in the project planning stage since the original intentions of a specific public service are put forward with limited rationality by the two sides. Social organizations have to find a contingent strategy to operate the public service project when the objects of targets and measures in the contract are hard to be matched. Third, the behavior of governments in the service performance evaluation causes a new kind of patriarchal intervene. Namely, the quantitative assessment about the quality of service conducted by governments or the third-party agencies hired by the former, not the social organizations, substantially affect the final procedures and ways of service delivery. Fourth, due to the fuzzy administrative duties and obligations, governments are lack of motivation and institutional responsibility to supervise the quality of service. The cases indicate that the expected social benefits failed to be achieved through the activities dominated by social organizations in the cooperative framework constructed by government. In other words, Government controls the main financial and human resources of social organizations which are essential to the delivery of public service. Nevertheless, under the pressure of performance and achievement evaluation based on the institutional legitimacy, social organizations have to spend their limited resources and most of time to deal with the assessed paperwork. Although the paperwork holds potential benefits to the evaluation of government performance but usually deviate from the real goals of service itself. These assessments are mainly sponsored and supported by government, while the third-party agencies also need to follow the will of government to focus on the quantitative indicators whether or not to be qualified formally, not the real social benefits that have been increased by the public services. It may be probably a myth to just admit government can be effectively to solve the problem of voluntary failure, especially in the real context of China. In this paper, we try to show the re-failed interventions from government to social organizations and explain how these phenomenon come into being. We also try to modify the classic cognition and provide new insights about how government can effectively to solve the problem of voluntary failure in the social context of China. The government still maintains the characteristics of its own failure and hardly to help social organizations to avoid voluntary failure. Besides the expectation for the maturity and autonomous ability of social organizations, the profound reform of government itself should be regarded as a necessary precondition for achieving effective cooperation.
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引用本文:
王诗宗 杨帆. 政府治理志愿失灵的局限性分析——基于政府购买公共服务的多案例研究[J]. 浙江大学学报(人文社会科学版), 2017, 3(5): 184-195.
Wang Shizong Yang Fan. The Limitations of Governance on Voluntary Failure: A Multi-case Study on Government Purchase of Service Contracting. JOURNAL OF ZHEJIANG UNIVERSITY, 2017, 3(5): 184-195.