From Quality Improvement to Better Meta-Governance : The Case of a Housing for Workers in Mexico

This paper explores the evolution in the definition of ―quality‖ at the National Institute of the Found for Housing of the Workers (Infonavit). Infonavit is a Mexican organization created to collect a compulsory social security contribution aimed to finance low interest mortgages for private sector workers. In 2000, Infonavit began a deep transformation that included increasing the quality of service. However, the challenge of offering housing that provides quality of life to their owners required the coordination and induction of certain behaviors among a wide array of actors, including municipal authorities, private developers and beneficiaries. Therefore, service quality had to be reinterpreted beyond compliance with standards and client satisfaction in order to improve the coordination between public, private and social actors. Initiatives such as increasing information and transparency, offering nudges and articulating needs are discussed as means used by Infonavit to improve the housing sector governance (meta-governance). Infonavit is an example of how improving public services quality can also lead to better governance in policy areas by empowering the beneficiaries and sending the right signals to the private sector. Introduction Public sector reforms have embraced profusely the language of quality, especially since the 1990s. However, there has been a heated debate about the usefulness and adequacy of such concepts and their associated management techniques in the public sector (Graham, 1994 and Walsh, 1991). The adoption of a ―costumer focus‖ has been controversial. Some consider that the introduction of approaches and techniques of quality management, inspire by private sector practices, can result in the hollowing out of the public service ethos (Parrado Díez and Ruíz López, 2010). Others consider that this is a false debate, as the notion of ―client‖ does not substitutes other aspects of citizenship, but only stresses that in the provision of public services, there are costumers, consumers or beneficiaries, whose needs, demands and expectations have to be satisfied (Aguilar, 2009). In practice, the introduction of initiatives aimed to improve service quality has often been the point of entrance to a wider vision of change in public service organizations. In many ways, aiming to achieve better client satisfaction or more robust processes have lead to efforts to improve the governance within a certain policy domain. In this sense, the relation between the public sector ethos and the introduction of quality management in reality is more complex than the referred debates tend to accept. In this paper, the experience of the National Institute of the Found for Housing of the Workers (Infonavit) with quality management is presented as an example of how the implementation of such initiatives results gradually in a wider understanding of what constitutes ―quality‖ in the housing policy domain. The National Institute of the Found for Housing of the Workers (Infonavit) is a Mexican organization created in 1972 aimed to fulfill the right of workers to housing. Since the year 2001 it has made efforts to redesign its processes and increase its beneficiaries‘ satisfaction with its services. However, the very success of the institute in implementing those changes has resulted in more ambitious objectives and to a wider interpretation of the public responsibilities of the organization. Therefore, the introduction of quality management concepts and techniques pushed for the reinforcement of the public values of the institution and greater awareness about the need to achieve greater collaboration between state and non-state actors within the housing sector. This paper is divided in three sections: the first deals with the different approaches to quality in the public sector from an international perspective. It argues that their limitations have prompted a search for strategies that allows to induce greater collaboration among different actors in a given policy domain. Here, the contemporary discussion about governance and the means to structure it (metagovernance) is presented. The second section presents the Infonavit‘s case, stressing the different approaches to quality that have been adopted at different stages of the institute‘s transformation. Particular attention will be given to a set of initiatives that have been successful in changing the patterns of relationships among the Infonavit‘s beneficiaries, the public authorities and private actors of the housing policy sector. These initiatives aim at increasing information and transparency, offering nudges and articulating beneficiaries‘ needs. Finally, some concluding remarks will be offered. From quality management to governance During the last three decades have seen a series of public sector reform initiatives that have been aimed at dealing with the perceived ailments of traditional public administration, characterized by its emphasis on the application of the rules and the establishment of closely regulated procedures, a fragmented division of tasks and fragmentation of units inherited from the mass production techniques (Fordism) and scientific management (Taylor, Fayol, Urwick and Gulick) and a by assuming Wilson‘s politics – administration dichotomy between. The critics of this model considered that the government was an opaque set of inflexible, impersonal and inefficient organizations that were more concerned to satisfying their own ends than in delivering positive results to society, that is, public value (Moore, 1995). Even worse, some commentators considered that governments were a source of further difficulties rather than a solution: the idea of ―government failures‖ acknowledges the limits of public intervention in solving social problems and correcting the deficiencies of the markets (Weimer & Vining 1992). This implies that, as in the private sector, public organizations have to demonstrate to the citizens that are able to deliver greater in comparison with other forms of organizations or even in comparison with the alternative of non-intervention. The New Public Management (NPM) style reforms were a response to these criticism. NPG has been focused on incorporating the needs and expectations of citizens in the delivery of public services and programs, by promoting competition within the public sector and the adoption of and post bureaucratic forms of management and organization within government. As an administrative philosophy, NPM is based on two central assumptions: first, that the best way to allocate goods (public or private) is through competitive mechanisms, and second, that the differences between public and private sector while real do not impede to transference of managerial technologies from one onto the other, with the necessary adaptations (Hood, 1991). The NPM has two distinctive elements (Hood, 1994): the first, which has been called the marketization of public sector relates to the introduction of market mechanisms or the simulation of competition within the public sector. The later, managerialism, is understood as the introduction of post-bureaucratic forms of organization in the public sector, often under the influence of private sector experiences. These efforts, as indicated by Aucoin (1990), rely on different sets of justifications intellectual origins distinct but converging, not without tensions, within the NGP. The introduction of quality management in government has been associated with the managerialist stream of NPM, as it aims to transform the way public organizations are managed in order to improve their responsiveness to the citizen‘s needs and expectations. Initiatives aimed to achieve quality improvements in public services have often been the point of entrance to a wider vision of change in public service organizations. In many ways, aiming to achieve better client satisfaction or more robust processes have open the scope of further reforms as public officials realize that internal efficiency and efficacy has limited impact on the well-being of people if there is no collaboration or coordination with other social and economic actors. Therefore, they are more aware of the needs to improve the governance of the policy domain within which they operate. In a way, reforms that successfully introduce quality management practices reach a point in which the understanding of the concept of ―quality‖ changes and in some cases becomes even more challenging, evolving from complying with standards, to client satisfaction to improving the impacts of public action over the beneficiaries and on society as a whole. Quality management in government From the mid 1980s and especially during the 1990s many governments adopted the concept of ̳quality‘ and ̳quality management‘ as part of their effort to improve public services. While most of these efforts were found in local governments or specific offices, in some countries, such as Canada, Belgum, France, Portugal and the UK, there were centrally steered initiatives in this direction (Shand and Arnberg, 1996). The drive for quality has seen its most notorious examples in the creation of different indicators and league tables that are used to single out those organizations delivering poor quality service (Gaster and Squires, 2003). In Mexico, since the 1990 the federal government has sought to introduce quality certifications, models and standards in different agencies. Even that these efforts have been diffused worldwide, the basic definition of what is meant by ̳quality‘ is very diverse. Aguilar (2009) and Bovaird (in Bovaird Tony and Elke Löfler, 2003) trace the different approaches to the concept that can be found within the quality management literature. They identify the following ways of understanding quality:  Quality as ―conformance with requirements‖: this definition, associated with the pioneer efforts to control the quality of products in the manufacturing industr