Misguided opposition to efficiency reforms?
Municipal finances worsened in 2024, according to Statistics Norway (SSB). Could misguided resistance from local democracy and trade unions be slowing needed standardization?
March 17, 2025 | NORWEGIAN POLITICS
Image by AI/S&P
Fear of losing autonomy
Autonomy (self-governance) is an important principle both for local democracy and for certain professional fields, such as education. The question is whether these actors have misunderstood it to mean that standardization will limit their autonomy. Standardization is not a reform or a corporate model.
Norwegian municipalities could be significantly more efficient through standardization, for example within elderly care and education. At the same time, it would reduce disparities in service provision between municipalities.
What is standardization?
Standardization is solving a task according to a defined procedure within similar units or professional fields. In other words, it consists of procedures for operating an organization or unit. This can include everything from the implementation and use of digital solutions to something as simple as nurses washing their hands.
Standardization is perhaps best known in the private sector as an important factor for profitability. But it is also common for the state to standardize, for example through NAV (the Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration). This is not the place to discuss how successful the NAV reform has been, but when it comes to the standardization intended to operate under the reform, NAV has considerable room for improvement. The distinction between the two rarely emerges in public debates about NAV.
How successful a standardization effort is can, among other things, be measured by how many deviations an organization has and how these deviations affect operations and finances. For example, if 80 percent of operations follow the procedure while 20 percent deviate from it, one would 1) seek to improve operations by refining procedures to reduce deviations, and 2) ensure that there are procedures in place to handle deviations satisfactorily.
Autonomy is independent of standardization
The above has no bearing on a municipality’s autonomy; they still retain self-governance over their resources. Nor does it affect a teacher in school, who can still exercise their profession autonomously. They would, however, have more resources at their disposal.
Although Norwegian municipalities have procedures, and larger municipalities standardize their operations, the efficiency process itself is largely inefficient. It has mostly been left to each municipality to develop its own procedures and standards for its units. This means that hundreds of municipal administrations spend resources reinventing the wheel, while the world around them continues to develop at an ever faster pace. In addition to the unnecessary costs this imposes on taxpayers, it has led to differences in service provision across municipalities, which runs counter to the welfare state’s principle of equality for all.
Example from Skien Municipality
An audit report from January this year shows that Skien Municipality has extensive systemic failures in workforce planning within its Health and Welfare unit. Sick leave was as high as 11.4 percent in 2024. According to Halvor Berg-Hanssen, a city council representative for the Conservative Party in the Conservative-led municipality, this has cost the municipality NOK 140 million. This figure does not appear in the audit, but it is unlikely to have emerged from a thorough impact analysis; the actual cost is probably much higher.
The report shows that Skien Municipality lacks the understanding, competence, and resources needed to establish the procedures required to ensure adequate staffing in the unit. If the municipality had had an overarching procedure for workforce planning that takes into account all the elements necessary for sound planning, both administrative costs and sick leave could have been significantly reduced—not only for this unit, but for all units in the municipality.
Gains for all municipalities
With standardization, the methodology and tools used would be the same for all municipalities. The argument about differing needs is not relevant, as good standardization procedures are dynamic and can scale up and down according to the size of the unit.
Municipal staffing needs must also be part of state-level procedures. This applies both to how resource needs are mapped and planned, and to how education is organized to meet those needs. The state is far behind—especially in vocational education. These are major challenges that have not been resolved in Norway.
Catch-22
Municipalities each spend large sums to find answers to issues that are the same in every municipality—as in the case of Skien Municipality. It is a Catch-22 with no end in sight.
Finally, returning to the question: Have both local democracy and trade unions misunderstood what standardization is? Does this hinder efficiency improvements that would give municipalities better finances and more resources at their disposal?
SOURCES
Statistisk sentralbyrå (Statistics Norway)
Municipal economySkien kommune/Vestfold og Telemark revisjon (Skien Municipality/Vestfold and Telemark Audit)
Staffing and sick leave in Skien municipalitySkien Høyre (Skien Conservative Party)
Can we get sick leave under control?
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