Keeping the lights on
Citizen service centres in municipal amalgamations

How do you make major reforms go down? This was the central question many local politicians faced when implementing amalgamations in the 2007 local government reform in Denmark. An African proverb says that the best way to eat the elephant standing in your path is to cut it up into little pieces. This strategy was also popular in amalgamated municipalities, where the potential loss of closeness was a major challenge to the citizens. This is demonstrated by a study of the diffusion of a new organizational form to organize social service delivery by citizen-service-centres (CSCs), in a reform context. Empirical evidence from a Poisson regression highlights the importance of the former municipal structure as a determining factor for the prevalence of CSCs in the new municipal structure. Using process tracing, it is argued that the importance of the former structure in the diffusion process reflects that CSCs are employed “to keep to lights on” in the old town halls.