The Street Office Purchases Community Public Services Research From Social Organizations

Nowadays, the current Chinese society has been restructured thoroughly and community has become the basic unit of primary social management. At the same time, with the relatively fast economic development, all kinds of social public demands have been growing rapidly and city residents’requirements for community public services are much higher and more urgent than ever before.Because the administrative trends in social management are obvious, the traditional community management approach ran by sub-district offices has its limitation in providing community public services. There is a disconnection between the single approach of providing community public services by government, and the diversified, personalized and multi-leveled requirements of community residents.The communique of the fifth plenum of the17th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China pointed out that efforts should be made to reform the methods of providing fundamental public services such as introducing the competition mechanism and enlarging purchasing public services in order to diversify the subjects and ways of providing.In recent years, as a new idea, a new system and a new way of providing public services:government contracting-out, which is originated in western welfare states and with contractual relationship as its essential attribute, has been widely used in variety fields of social public services and accumulated lots of good experience by Chinese local governments.As the main provider of community public services, sub-district offices have the closest relations with the community. By government contracting-out, it helps sub-district offices to adapt city residents’ increasing requirements for community public services, to upgrade the quality and efficiency of public services, to handle complex neighborhoods work with limited public funds. However, there are also several problems in government contracting-out practice, such as non-standard purchase process and monopoly service suppliers.Therefore, based on the theory of New Public Management, New Public Service, Governing and Service Oriented Government, and integrated with the government contracting-out practice in YJ sub-district, this paper begins with the analysis and research on the sub-district office’s purchasing behavior, proposed that there’re some specific public services which are suitable for sub-district offices to buy, and social organizations are supposed to be the qualified public service suppliers for the sub-district offices. It is necessary to form a prospective market competition mechanism for public service suppliers. During the public services purchasing process, sub-district offices ought to establish a set of standard procedures, which includes investigation of community needs, feasibility studies, determining the service for purchase, checking public finance budget, choosing service supplier from several social organizations, selecting appropriate purchase patterns, drawing up a contract and signing on it. It is also very important for sub-district offices to take some dynamic supervision procedure and enhance the in-process management while service projects are being implemented by the social organization in communities.Furthermore, it is essential to establish and improve a scientific evaluation criteria and assessment methods in order to reinforce the measurement and motivation for social organizations at the end of contract period or the year. Considering that social organizations have localization trends in their developing process, work also should be done to promote contract management systems and to stimulate supplier competition, so that it would be possible for sub-district offices to reduce the incumbents’ advantages and manage to avoid suppliers’monopolization.In the end, some advice are offered in this paper, that the central government, local governments and civil administration departments should pay more attention to setting up and improving policy systems on government contracting-out so as to help sub-districts upgrade the quality and efficiency of community public services purchase.