The promotion and disruption of community service delivery systems (1).

McDonald, Catherine ; Zetlin, Di

Introduction

Community services, known internationally as personal social services, are the key operational vehicle of our response to various forms of dependency across the lifespan. At some point in virtually all of our lives we will be users of community services. For some people, such as people with disability, that use is lifelong. Despite their obvious importance in people's lives, for a significant part of the modern era of the welfare state community services were not a primary focus of social policy analysis. More recently that situation has begun to change (McDonald and Marston, 2002). Indeed Thomson (2002, p. 108) claims that welfare system studies of the social care of vulnerable populations (of which this is an example) have recently resurfaced as a subject of debate in international social policy studies. Certainly that is the case in Britain, and in the United States.

In Britain, the resurgence of interest in service delivery systems has largely materialized from the reorganisation of the social service departments of local authorities, and the associated application of new public management and contractualism in social care (Hiscock and Pearson, 1999; Charlesworth, Clarke and Cochran, 1996). In that country and in the United States, the functioning of service delivery systems was and is largely conceived as a problem of coordination. These issues have, under British New Labour, increasingly been subsumed within a framework of partnerships in a reformed model of welfare governance (Clarke, and Glendinning, 2002). Reflecting the dominant theme of coordination, in the United States the primary term employed in the literature about human service delivery systems is that of service integration. Reviewing a substantial empirical literature going back to the 1970s, Bolland and Wilson (1994) for example, note that fragmentation and poor coordination characterised a variety of human service policy domains (for example, mental health, substance abuse, aged care, child abuse and homelessness).

In 1997, Waldfogal claimed that service integration in the United States had moved to a second phase. The first phase, she argued, was largely concerned with administrative reforms to hierarchical service delivery systems. Its origins was found in the Model Cities program (Hassett and Austin, 1997), when efforts were made to coordinate the administration of largely publicly delivered health, education and welfare programs at local levels. This program and its successors were not seen as successful and were discontinued in the mid-1970s. The second (current) phase is substantially different in that, like Britain, it entails significant shifts in the governance and financing of welfare, moving away from hierarchy, towards markets and networks. The advent of this phase prompted Ralph Kramer, an important scholar of American social welfare policy to comment in 1994, that as far as he knew, no research had been undertaken about the impact of service delivery reforms that took the service delivery system as the unit of analysis.

In Australia, the first 'phase' or local version of the same impetus to reform the entity that we call the service delivery system was found in the activities of Regional Councils for Social Development of the Australian Assistance Plan in the 1970s. These councils, established throughout the country, were responsible for planning and coordinating services in their regions (Graycar, 1978). It is generally accepted that the councils were a flawed, if not failed initiative (Graycar and Davis, 1979). Evaluations, such as the Task Force on Co-ordination in Health and Welfare (1997), the South Australian Community Services Sector Review (1992) and Fine (1995) continue to report difficulties with service co-ordination. More latterly, contemporary local approaches to what can be considered to be the same problem domain have included such proposals and trial processes as place management (Walsh, 2001) which, like the approach of New Labour, largely revolve around the reform of governance. In all three jurisdictions, the linkages between the current phases of service integration/partnerships/place management, and a reform-driven vision of what a service delivery system in should theoretically look like in 21st century modes of governance can be drawn.

Halley (1997) and Reitan (1998) both argue that the concept of service integration as it is employed in the United States, while deeply rooted in the practice of the delivery of human services, is conceptually imprecise. Furthermore, it is highly normative in that it assumes that coordination and integration is preferable to differentiation, fragmentation and specialisation. It can and is understood in different ways (Halley, 1997; Walter and Petr, 2000): as structure, as process, as attitudes, as relationships involving formal and informal components. We argue that similar understandings are found here, and that a comparable degree of conceptual imprecision and normative orientation characterises the Australian discussions of the domain in question. In other words, service integration, collaboration and coordination, loosely defined in a range of ways, are considered a worthy goal of policy intervention.

Here, we focus on this aspect of the community services in Australia but in a more fundamental or perhaps elemental way. We are interested in systematically exploring the operations of the community service delivery system; an approach which tends, in the Australian literature and policy debates, to receive only intermittent attention, usually of an anecdotal kind. Community service delivery systems are central to policy strategies and programs associated with, for example, deinstitutionalisation of people with disability and with care for the frail aged. Nevertheless, we know very little about them, and policy makers tend to make assumptions about the system and its' functioning. Furthermore, we know little about how to govern or manage networks of services, a lacuna not confined to Australia (Provan and Milward, 2001). Community service delivery systems are, in our understanding, more than the sum of services provided by one program such as HACC. They are also more than the administrative integration of formal services. Rather, the service delivery system consists of all the formal services and informal support systems in a community of locality which, ideally, function as a supportive network for dependent people enabling them to live their lives to their fullest capacity. Accordingly, our focus recognises that community service delivery systems are, as Charlesworth et al (1996, p. 69) noted, resolutely local in terms of the availability of various types of support and prevailing sets of relationships, as well as the result of policies of governments.

The project that this particular paper reports in part was designed to address the gap in knowledge about the operations of community services delivery systems; itself part of a larger study on the impact of community service delivery reform. Here, we report data drawn from six communities in Queensland collected in 2001 and 2002. We draw on focus groups and interviews with service providers in inner urban, outer urban, rural and remote communities in Queensland. The scope of that data collection encapsulated a variety of dimensions of the community services delivery system and its operations.

In this paper we focus specifically on factors which disrupt the functioning of the service delivery system and the factors which promote it, concluding with participants' assessment of the status of the system at this juncture. In doing so, the paper provides insight into the actual operations of the community services delivery system.

The study

The sampled communities were chosen to reflect a number of characteristics. First, they replicate the demographic patterns of the Queensland population as a whole (that is, median age, gender distribution, proportion of the population over sixty five years of age, Indigenous population, overseas born population). Second, in regards to the comparative socio-economic position, three of our communities were below the Queensland average, and three were above. Third, two communities (one socio-economically below the Queensland average, and one above) were from urban Brisbane, two (again one socio-economically below the Queensland average, and one above) were outer/fringe urban Brisbane, one community was rural (that is, within three hours drive of the closet regional administrative centre), and one was remote (that is, more than twelve hours drive from the nearest regional administrative centre). Each of the latter reflects the same socio-economic variance.

We interviewed people from a range of organisations providing services to people with disability (2). Typically, in each area there were a number of disability-specific organisations plus a range of other organisations which, while providing generalist services, also provided services to people with disabilities and their families. Included in the sample were the local branches of six large organisations (mostly large charities), most of which provided state-wide services. The rest of the interviewees were located in medium to small organisations (incorporated associations). The disability-specific services offered such services as respite care and other family support, accommodation services, community options, employment, recreation services and advocacy. The generalist agencies were either neighbourhood or community centres, or general family welfare agencies. Where appropriate, we also interviewed people located in local government authorities or other similar auspice agencies. Finally, in some areas, we interviewed the Disability Services Queensland (DSQ) (3) Local Area Coordinators (LACs).

The people being supported experienced a wide range of disabilities: physical, visual and hearing impairment, developmental/intellectual disabilities, mental health disabilities and acquired brain injury. The majority (around sixty percent) were people with intellectual disabilities. Increasingly, these service providers were servicing people with mental health issues and autism spectrum disorders. Clients are from of all age groups. While some services reported serving people from all socio-economic groups, most indicated that the majority of their clients occupy low socio-economic positions. Services in three communities (that is, rural, remote and outer urban), made specific mention of Indigenous people in their client group. The numbers of clients vary according to the type of service. A transport service, for example, can serve up to eight hundred clients. Respite services tend to provide services to between fifty to eighty people. In-home personal care services tend to be provided to one to three hundred people. Accommodation services are smaller, around twenty people. Similarly, employment services tend to be small, with around twenty to thirty clients.

The funding sources for agencies are highly diverse. Funds were received from: Queensland Housing, Queensland Legal Md, DSQ, Queensland Health, Queensland Department of Families, Queensland Department of the Premier and Cabinet (Multicultural Affairs Queensland). Organisations also received funds from the Commonwealth Departments of Health and Aged Care, Family and Community Services, DEWR and Immigration. Finally, many agencies reported receiving some support from such discretionary sources as the Gaming Machine Benefit Fund and the various Casino funds. A significant minority received some fees for service from service users. A small group receives some funds through the provision of sub-contracted services from other agencies. Finally, a number of agencies were actively pursuing commercial venturing as the major source of funds.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted, usually with the coordinator of a service, or in the case of generalist services, with those staff who work with people with disability. In total, fifty six interviews were conducted; eleven each in the rural and remote communities, ten in two of the urban communities, and eight and six respectively in the other two urban communities. In addition, three 'state-wide' (4) focus groups of between eight to ten service providers were conducted in Brisbane, and additional focus groups with service providers were held in each of the sampled communities, taking the total number of focus groups to nine. All of the interviews and focus groups were guided by a standardised series of questions developed from the literature. The interviews were recorded, transcribed and analysed thematically. Finally, the research confirmed to the ethical protocols human research required of research conducted by the University of Queensland.

Factors disrupting the functioning of the community services delivery system

Three broad categories of factors disrupting the integrated functioning of the community services delivery system were identified in all six communities studied. One group was more or less political in nature. A second group of factors arose from the operations of service delivery organisations themselves. The third group arose from the operations of the funding departments.

Political factors

In four of the six communities, political processes within the local area were considered to have an influence on how the service delivery system operates. In one area, political tensions within the local council and the active engagement of local branches of political parties in agencies de-stabilised the service delivery system. In regards to the first, the Mayor's sensitivities ensured that other counsellors would not become involved in agencies without active permission. This in turn, ensured that there was little useful support from that local government for community services, an issue we will discuss in more detail later. In the second, local political party members used the sector to promote their own interests, and in doing so, undermined the governance of service delivery organisations. Furthermore, in stacking the committees, the capacity for other community actors to participate were diminished:

 We have fought off a number of takeovers. I have been present at
 Annual General Meetings, where you might have up to 40 members of a
 particular political party who will move in and put all their
 nominees in, and who, after the election, will disappear gradually
 and move out.

In the two rural areas, two types of processes around the issue of race were impacting on the community service delivery system, both of which ensured that service delivery to Indigenous people was disrupted. Prior to illustrating these, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous informants made it clear that the Indigenous population in both communities were subject to many forms of racism. Returning to the community services, first, non-Indigenous agencies refer Indigenous people to Indigenous agencies, irrespective of the presenting issues. As a consequence, two systems operate, largely independent of each other. Furthermore, given the extensive needs of the Indigenous population, the Indigenous agencies alone are unable to cope adequately:

 There are not enough agencies, Aboriginal agencies. Those
 committees, forums, whatever you want to call them, say that
 they're [Indigenous people] to be addressed in culturally
 appropriate ways. Basically all I can say is there are services out
 there, organizations out there that just aren't doing their job.
 And they are not meeting the needs of the Aboriginal people in
 this region.

Furthermore, the Indigenous agencies themselves to not collaborate particularly well:

 I wouldn't say that they actually mix together, but I wouldn't say
 that they don't mix either. Come times for Aboriginal celebrations,
 like NAIDOC Week, that's a matter of everyone getting together. But
 when it comes to their own particular organizations, and they do
 have their own organizations, they're very separate.

This lack of collaboration appears, in part, to be a function of the politics of the Indigenous populations in both areas. Here, several factors were suggested. Indigenous workers, for example, are inhibited from working in non-Indigenous agencies.

 It's quite rife within the Indigenous community that a lot of
 Indigenous people who work for non-Indigenous people are prejudiced
 against by their own mob.

Also, relationships between Indigenous agencies themselves are undercut by politics within the Indigenous community:

 A large problem with Aboriginal organizations here is the family,
 the nepotism, the hiring of family members. The committee members
 are all family. There's quite a lot of that goes on in the region.

In four of the six communities (all urban), politics within the community services sector were operative, destabilising the capacity of the services to act as an integrated system. This took several forms. The proliferation of peak organisations was mentioned, a situation which according to one informant meant that: a lot of energy is spent on maintaining those organisations rather than the grassroots people. Another common experience was distrust between organisations, particularly between small and large organisations. The latter were characterised as take-over merchants. Furthermore, lack of cooperation can be driven by individual agendas within organisations:

 That's often driven by people's individual agendas. Some of those
 key people's agendas of ensuring that their own needs would be
 looked after when it came to funding or the way information is
 shared. Other parts of it are, like, when there are opportunities
 for joint work, of sometimes people deliberately being excluded
 from being invited. Or a meeting might be held but then you don't
 ever hear when the next meeting is, so there's lots of subtle
 ways! There's all that typical politics that happens in the
 community!

In one urban area, the community service delivery system was fractured into two, and relationships were very poor:

 I've only been in this state for five years. I have found this to be
 a very closed service system. I find that there is a lot of
 mistrust, misinformation, gossip, backbiting, undermining,
 white-anting. I have spent numerous years now trying to understand
 why that is. And the only thing I can put it down to is that there
 is a particular model of so-called community development that's
 taken hold in this part of the world. That model of community
 development says if you don't do it our way then there's no way to
 do it. And that has meant that there's nothing happening. And
 people really have to stick their necks out and cop it from the
 rest of their profession to try and change it. There's this
 message that goes out to people that if you don't use this
 particular model, or if you're not prepared to do it the way
 that we're doing it, there is somehow something very wrong
 with who you are, what you are, what you're trying to do.

Poor cooperation may not, however, be the result of conflict, but can also result from taken for granted ways of operating. In all of the urban communities, lack of cooperation within the service delivery system more as a function of habit was discussed, illustrated well by this comment:

 If we as a Community Options program want someone to have their
 house cleaned, we refer to Community Health. They may or may not
 respond. They may never let us know that they're in a house. They
 will go and do their own assessment. They will not provide the
 service just because we recognise that it's needed. They will not
 cooperate on that level so that person will be assessed over and
 over and over by a variety of people. They don't tell us if they
 change their day or their time. Nursing services don't also. So if
 we're trying to link someone into respite, we might get an irate
 nursing service telling us that that's the day they go in. They may
 change their day without consultation with the client or with us,
 and so it's very difficult to assist a client when the other
 services don't communicate. The nursing services in Queensland do
 not cooperate with any other agency unless it's to their advantage
 across the board--at a management level, a client level, or any
 other level.

Returning to the issue of the role of local government, it was clear from these interviews that the attitude of local government to community services was crucial to the functioning of the service delivery system. In the rural and remote areas, local government was relatively disinterested. In the one urban area covered by the Brisbane City Council, the services had little to do with the Council's community development function. Most illustrative of the role of local government was the situation demonstrated in one urban fringe area, outside the Brisbane City Council area. Previously, this council had a very active social policy director, who had, through her work, done a great deal to fashion and support an effective, coordinated community services delivery system. When she left, she was replaced by another person with a different orientation to the role of Council in community services.

 Just about everything that had happened over five years was
 dismantled, within two months. We thought that we'd educated them
 well enough over five years, and that they would never dismantle
 something like that and yet within months! They [the council]
 thought this man was just brilliant because all of a sudden he was
 saving them money. He was putting up charges on all sorts of things.
 Like there was some discussion at one point last year (which
 completely got my back up) about how community centres should have
 to pay rent to Council. I just laughed and thought it was
 hysterical that they should be saying that community based
 organisations would pay rent to occupy their premises when in fact
 what we're doing is occupying their premises and providing Council
 with a referral point and a community service. So I said to them,
 'look, that's fine, we'll just go and we will deliberately pay
 rent somewhere else because we won't pay it to the local
 government and we won't take any more referrals from you'. We
 get probably 18-20 referrals a day from different parts of Council,
 so if you don't understand the impact that we have on your lives
 every single day as councillors and as Council bureaucrats, then
 'get nicked', pretty much.

Factors within community service delivery organisations

Two primary factors serving to disrupt the operations of service delivery system arise from within service delivery agencies. Furthermore, they were common in all six communities. The first of these was the turnover of staff, with the result that informal and formal relationships were continually breaking down and needing to be re-built. The second factor was the tendency for service delivery agencies to be inward looking, focused on their own service delivery. This was often a function of pressure of work:

 We tend to be nose down bum up, bogged down with responding to stuff
 that's presenting. There's not much capacity there to do that
 connecting. Not for attending interagency. I don't have the time, I
 haven't for the last year or so and I think that's a problem because
 you don't find out about other services and the direction they're
 heading in. We haven't been liaising much with the local community
 to be honest.

Responding to a question about partnerships with other organisations and businesses, one respondent made it clear that such processes have a cost which the agency cannot bear:

 We need extra resources, we need basically a partnerships officer
 whose job it is to go out and make all of these links so that our
 direct service workers then can go in and provide the resources,
 but we can't keep doing it. I've got to manage 65 staff. I can't
 keep managing, you know, 15 partnerships.

It was very clear that the capacity or willingness for service delivery organisations to engage in the sort of networking and other activity needed to promote the integration of an effective service delivery system was not evident in our six sampled communities. This relates to another factor which, when absent, seriously undermines the service delivery system. All six areas discussed what we call the lack of a community service development function. Integrated functioning service delivery systems do not happen naturally. When such a funded service development function is present in a community, the system is improved. This was best illustrated in the urban fringe community which had once had a federally funded service devoted specifically to service and system support and development. Its' demise has very significant consequences for the service delivery system, further weakened by the change in attitude of the local government discussed previously.

Factors arising from funding departments

Six separate factors were identified, operative in all six communities. Employing a term developed by Latham (1998), the first of these is the operation of funding bodies as 'silos'. Funding departments, for example, apparently routinely re-classify issues as the responsibility of another funding department: 'There's no pathway, if you go to Health, they'll say well that's a Housing issue. If you go to Housing, they'll say well that's a Health issue and that's the end of the story.' Demarcation issues between DSQ and Health cause difficulties, resulting in buck-passing.

 If you're a carer, to operate in that role you need to have certain
 services and supports, You go to Disability Services Queensland and
 Queensland Health and they'll say 'sorry it's not our arena. You
 have to go to the Queensland Council of Carers.' I mean they chop
 it all into pieces. You know 'This is not psych disability, it's
 maybe intellectual. Maybe it's a dual diagnosis', or 'No, sorry,
 that person has schizophrenia, but because it's drug induced you
 have to go to Drug and Alcohol.'

Despite 'talk' (formal policy claims) about inter-departmental collaboration, it does not translate to the 'coalface':

 You're 'talking the talk'. You're talking 'collaboration'. There's
 a cross-government service agreement, cross-government reporting,
 cross-government this, cross-government that. And collaboration is
 happening in government services above the coalface, but once you
 get up to the guys who are operating the lifts to go down to the
 coalface. You know, nobody's working together. They're all looking
 after their own little patch.

This silo-like operation of funding departments also translates into the community service delivery system itself:

 We have inter-agencies that are about health organizations or aged
 care, but we don't have an interagency of the organizations in a
 particular community getting together and swing 'okay what are we
 seeing as the needs? How can we work together?' There's a reluctance
 within the community sector to go beyond [the sub-sector] people are
 in. So whether it's talking about the whole sector going beyond the
 community sector or people who work in disability services not
 making the connection that an employment service up the road or a
 community centre or whatever.

Other problems arise from high staff turnover in funding departments, staff inexperience and limited knowledge about local conditions, especially the rural and remote areas. One interviewee, for example, claimed to have had five DSQ liaison officers in the last eighteen months, and as a consequence, there was 'no way' she could build relationships with them. Related to this is an increasing tendency, especially at the Commonwealth level, for functions to be centralised:

 We had good relations with our project officer in the past and they
 came out more regularly to the area. They knew what was going on.
 Then some of their responsibilities got taken away and they are now
 in Brisbane, and some of them in Canberra. This is a problem. You
 have to ring a person in Brisbane but they don't know what the
 distance is from X and Y, or whatever I'm talking about.

Respondents in the rural and remote communities reported that funding bodies were often experienced as being inflexible. Because of the different conditions of these communities agencies had, on occasion, to be quite innovative in how they delivered services. However, getting permission to spend money in different ways was slow, and officers could 'have heart attacks' if they found out that agencies had acted without waiting for permission.

Funding models, particularly the individual packages also posed problems, in that there is little extra money for other activities such networking: 'They're [DSQ] just paying basically for the hourly rate of the worker. They only see [on-going] coordination as a small part of it. However, the factor most frequently raised in all the communities can be characterised as funding bodies' attitudes. The most common manifestation of this was perceptions that governments do not relate to them as partners, but as agents:

 And it's not working WITH any more. It's really just pointing the
 finger at 'you'll do this and you will do it by this time and
 there's no excuses'. The say 'jump' and you say 'how high'.

An indigenous worker in a remote community disliked what he saw as a tendency by funding representatives to claim superior knowledge:

 I mean I want to talk to people and clients to tell me how we can
 address their needs. I don't need a public servant from Brisbane
 telling me what they think or what their client needs. I mean I can
 go and look in a mirror and tell myself.

This overall attitude can have curious and negative effects on the service delivery system. For example, people in both rural and remote communities talked about changes to processes without any consultation. For example, in relation to staff development:

 The trend seems to be for different approaches to training for a
 start, getting up a videoconference rather than actually travelling
 to that area and delivering the training. But all the feedback we
 get from remote areas is 'no, we want to have face-to-face
 training', because as everybody knows, the networking part of your
 training is sometimes more important than the workshop itself. So by
 taking that away from remote services, they feel that isolation so
 much more. But they don't understand that, people don't understand
 that in Brisbane

Another noted that the capacity for funding departments, especially Commonwealth funding departments to assist them has diminished significantly:

 It's not as good as it used to be. They're not as supportive as what
 they used to be. It might be related to the fact that now things are
 competitive, so that they don't want to seem like they're saying the
 wrong thing, that they're giving the wrong advice. There seems to be
 that fear from departments or officials.

 What about Commonwealth?

 Oh, the Commonwealth is worse! During funding rounds, they won't
 talk to anyone. They'll have one workshop and that's basically it,
 and what it is, they put a video on and you watch the video and
 that's it!

It was noted by most of the interviewees that in the current environment, funding bodies gave conflicting messages, expecting them for example to "cooperate and compete at the same time" cooperate at the consumer level and compete against each other at funding rounds.

Finally, apart from the (reported to be diminishing) use of volunteers, virtually no-one in any area talked about linkages with the informal networks, even when specifically asked. Rather, a significant majority of people thought that while for some clients informal supports existed, there was virtually no connection between the informal system and the formal system. Indeed a commonly held belief is that the formal system swings into operation when the informal system breaks down. Reasons given for non-involvement with informal systems, in the main, focussed on lack of time and resources to identify and work with possible or actual informal supports. One interviewee, however, specifically nominated the risks (potential legal liabilities) of working with informal community or church groups:

 Those informal networks probably don't take as much care and don't
 have as much responsibility or risk management technical expertise
 as we have and so we'd be, I think, a little bit suspicious about
 anything, not suspicious so much as very, very cautious about
 interactions with church groups or any other informal networks like
 that. I've got an in-built caution that goes up all the time, "where
 is it with our risk management?"

Clearly, this research has indicated that the operations of these six community service delivery systems are constrained by a wide range of factors arising from the local communities themselves, from within community service organisations, and from the funding bodies. Nevertheless, other factors were in evidence which facilitated the functioning of the system. These are discussed in the next section.

Factors promoting the functioning of the community services delivery system

A close reading of the preceding section demonstrates a range of possible factors that would, if remedied, promote the functioning of the community services delivery system. For example, this data clearly indicates that an interested and engaged local government authority can have a substantial impact on the development and functioning of an integrated system. Rather than repeat the above, here we report instead on factors specifically emphasised by informants.

By far the most important factor or process in the promotion and support of an integrated community services delivery system is the community service development role referred to in the previous discussion. This was most effective if formally constituted and funded. However, it can and does take different forms in the different communities. It can, for example, develop as a result of other policy initiatives such as the Social and Community Planners in some regions of Queensland funded by the Department of Families, often located with the local government authority. These people can include, usually by default, a significant networking and development function in their role. Another example of this is the effects of the Community Renewal program in the urban fringe communities. In other regions, the system development and maintenance role was taken up by local community development workers located in community centres or in the local council. In two areas, DSQ's Local Area Coordinator program acted to link up the formal service provision system.

In other areas, the role was essentially enacted on an even more 'voluntary' basis, either by a local leader or by a service provider. Leadership, particularly that of politicians was, in two communities (one urban and one remote), considered to be very important. One of these was a federal member, the other a state member. Both were reported to be actively involved in promoting the community service delivery system. Although we asked informants about the role of politicians in the other areas, it was clear that their input was minimal. In two areas, Centrelink social workers and other allied health workers were noted for working with the service delivery system, irrespective of whether it was part of their formal role.

Other factors nominated as supporting the functioning of the system and which operated in at least two communities were:

* A formally constituted and active consumer group and/or active parents and families of service users. Such actors place pressure on agencies to collaborate.

* Service provider willingness to work around strict organisational and program guidelines. Here, agencies supplied in kind assistance to other agencies, often against organisational and program guidelines.

* Management committee members engaged in other community networks.

* Proximity to Centrelink, encouraging linkages through service users.

* Strong linkages with local schools. School principals interested and engaged with disabled children in their schools beyond the education needs tended to encourage a degree of collaboration.

* Trust and reciprocity between service providers.

It should be noted that all interviewees in all six communities raised this last factor.

The status of the service delivery system

In each region we asked for interviewees' assessment of the functioning of the service delivery system. All, except for one (5), reported fragmentation, poor coordination and limited integration. The following comment was made, in various ways, in each community:

 There's also, you know, government rhetoric around partnerships and
 about collaboration and people working together, and the need for
 organisations to work together. But it takes an enormous amount of
 resources which we don't have. So you just keep doing what you do or
 you keep adding onto your workload.

For anyone actually involved in the delivery of community services, the findings of this study should not be particularly surprising. Its' relevance however lies in the realisation that despite the series of formalised attempts to tackle issues of system coordination and integration in this and other jurisdictions, in 2001 these six local service delivery systems remain fragmented.

The organisations included in this sample appear to be behaving similarly to those studied in Britain by Hiscock and Pearson (1999), in that they are inward-looking and preoccupied with their own organisation. They found that 'it was striking that when respondents were asked about inter-organisational relations, they tended to answer very briefly and then revert, unprompted and at considerable length, to a discussion about issues within their own organisation' (ibid, p. 156). While our experience was not this stark, the pre-occupation with internal organisational issues was nevertheless marked. Also, our conclusion that active community development support is necessary for the maintenance of community services delivery systems is confirmed by Adams and Nelson (1997). They also argue for a formal community-centred approach to service integration which seeks to interweave formal and informal systems of care, a feature missing in these service delivery systems.

Another conclusion we draw concurs with that made by Provan and Milward (2001). They argue that for service delivery organisational networks to operate effectively, someone needs to bear the transaction costs, and that network effectiveness is most likely in a resource rich environment. Here, it was clear that developing and promoting the service delivery system has significant and real, but for the most part unfunded costs attached to it. Furthermore, community services in Queensland remains a relatively resource-poor field. They also note (Milward and Provan, 2000) that network effectiveness is highest when the network is integrated, but only when that integration is centralised through a powerful core agency. Such a structure, in their opinion, facilitates both integration and coordination, and is also relatively efficient. Our study indicates first, that such a driving force (be it a structure or a process) is largely absent in these service delivery systems, and second, that there is potential for other processes (such as community renewal or community engagement) to be re-tooled in innovative ways to promote coordination. Whether such a strategy is possible and/or desirable resides within the political domain of State and Commonwealth governments, and remains unresolved. If it were to so develop, it would still represent what Hassett and Austin (1997) classify as second generation approaches to service integration. They prefer third generation approaches which would, they argue, require 'state policy makers to design comprehensive, collaborative approaches to meet [needs], incorporating strategies to develop the leadership base needed to support successful programs. States that have moved the farthest in developing state-wide strategies for supporting local collaboration have recognised the need for new structures to nurture collaborative efforts' (ibid, p. 17).

Further, Milward and Provan (2000) argue that in the current era of public governance, 'joint production' between the state and non-state agents remains a key process. For the joint production function to operate effectively, networks need stability. The systems we examined appear, unfortunately, to be rather unstable. Finally, Lowndes and Skelcher (1998) state that a network mode of governance relies on relations between actors which are conducted on the basis of mutual benefit, trust and reciprocity. Newell and Swan (2000, p. 4) argue that 'trust is one of the most frequently mentioned concepts in connection with inter-firm cooperation relations'. In our study the relations between service delivery agencies in some communities was strained, and the relations with government in all communities could not be described as based on trust and reciprocity.

Walter and Petr (2000) developed a continuum of inter-agency collaboration, ranging from cooperation, through coordination to collaboration, and finally integration, arguing that integration is the most desirable position to achieve. The service delivery systems we examined can, at best, be said to reflect elements of cooperation. They also argue that the available literature on interagency collaboration suggests that its success depends, in large part, on shared values and a common vision (ibid, p. 502). Again, we would be cautious about suggesting that such a situation prevails in the communities we examined.

In conclusion, this research has indicated that community service delivery systems do not appear to be particularly strong, and that there is a range of factors disrupting their operations as integrated systems. We have also indicated what would facilitate collaboration if not outright integration, should we as a society so desire. However, the voices we report here are those of formal service providers, a situation which, per force, allows us in this article to tell only half of the story. Service users' perspectives on their experiences of the service delivery system need to be brought into the debate, a standpoint also examined in the broader project of which this is part (6). Reported in a series of papers currently in production, their experiences as end-users of the community services delivery system reflects the processes described here, and more importantly, illustrates the negative consequences for them. In other words, those interviews indicate that the service delivery system is fragmented and disjointed, and as a consequence, service use is compromised. Limited though this research undoubtedly is, it nevertheless suggests that there is little room for complacency about the functioning of the community services delivery system. It also suggests that the wellbeing of community services delivery systems continue to warrant a significant place in the policy agendas of governments.

Footnotes

(1.) This research is supported by the Australian Research Council, the Queensland Department of Families, Uniting Care Queensland, ACOSS and QCOSS.

(2.) In effect, we interviewed all community sector agencies providing services to people with disability in each community.

(3.) The state authority responsible for people with disability.

(4.) By this, we mean with organisations that provided services across the state.

(5.) This interviewee was quite baffled by the idea of a 'community services delivery system'.

(6.) The researchers also interviewed fifty four service users, people with disability, in the six communities.

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Catherine McDonald & Di Zetlin

Catherine McDonald teaches in both the School of Social Work and Applied Human Sciences at the University of Queensland. Her teaching focuses on social policy, developments in the contemporary environment, the welfare state and community services, as well as the future of social and welfare practice. Di Zetlin teaches in the School of Political Science and International Relations at the same University. As well as the community services, she is interested in issues of governance, gender and industrial relations.