[1][2][3] Local service delivery was a key topic of discussion for academics and practitioners after the decentralization and corporatization that occurred under New Public Management and austerity following the 2007–2008 financial crisis.
[1][4][2][3] Since switching between the multiple options of service delivery often incurs costs, there is often high path dependency in local service delivery that makes it difficult to easily adjust policy choices to changed political and economic environments.
Since it is (due to geographic size) less likely that local governments possess certain types of expertise than higher layers of government,[7] they are more dependent on outside actors for service delivery, and yet less capable of monitoring them.
Such steering issues are a source of inefficiency for local service delivery.
[3] It is often the case that service delivery gets costlier as the population gets smaller, since there are high fixed costs of public policy.