The Effects of Co-production of the Social Infrastructure in Russia
I.L. Shagalov
National Research University Higher School of Economics
Keywords: сопроизводство, общественно-государственное партнерство, ТОС, местные сообщества, социальный капитал, общественные блага, коллективные ресурсы, co-production, public private partnership, TOS, local communities, social capital, public goods
Abstract
In economics the co-production of public goods by local communities, consider quite fruitful for replacement of government failures. The article describes the practice of implementing TOS communities (Territorialnoe Obshchestvennoe Samoupravlenie) projects on co-production of social urban infrastructure. Using the cases of local communities in the city of Kirov and the data on the Russian regions, we demonstrate that the effects of co-production can be multidirectional. We found that local government usually supports TOS communities. TOS allows in terms of municipal budget deficit over the citizen’s participation in funding of infrastructural projects to solve local problems and put-off attention of political active citizens for possible protest activities. The research demonstrates that TOS occurs when three conditions (vectors) form in society: civil responsibility, civil helplessness, and paternalism. In these circumstances, the authorities encourage and subsidize the formal self-organization of citizens that capable singly and under their responsibility to solve problems to which the authorities did not get around. At the same time government is in the position of win-win, on the one hand, it “drops” their responsibilities to citizens (through TOS), and on the other hand gets support of the population. These effects demonstrated in the paper.
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