Public Money & Management

Conceptualizing and Defining Public Service Delivery Hubs

In recent decades, research has explored partnerships, collaboration, and multi-agency working to improve public service delivery and outcomes. Public services policy-makers and practitioners have increasingly adopted the language of multi-agency ‘hubs’ to describe organizational arrangements bringing together services, professionals, and resources to address complex social challenges, typically in co-located service settings.

What do we mean by a hub?

Despite their growing importance, these public service hubs remain conceptually and empirically underdeveloped. For example, the term ‘hub’ can imply a clearly articulated centre of activity designed to improve wellbeing, service outcomes, and create public value. Equally, the term may be deployed as a descriptive label with limited consideration of its underlying meaning.

This conceptual ambiguity also reflects a lack of sustained theoretical engagement. Hubs have been examined empirically far more often than they have been theorized, and existing accounts draw only loosely on adjacent bodies of work such as collaborative governance, integrated and joined-up working, and public value theory. We particularly welcome contributions that engage with public service ecosystem thinking, which offers a way of situating hubs as an institutional expression of wider shifts in how public value is co-created across organizational boundaries, but submissions are equally welcome that draw on other theoretical traditions or that explicitly contrast competing framings.

In practice, hubs encompass a diverse range of arrangements. Examples include multi-agency safeguarding hubs, civil service hubs, family support hubs, and health and wellbeing hubs. These initiatives may seek to improve coordination and information sharing, integrate service provision, facilitate professional collaboration, or provide a shared space from which multiple organizations operate. However, hubs vary in terms of levels of co-location, integration, communication, and collaboration.

Hub models are also informed by different policy objectives and service delivery contexts. Some are designed to respond to high-risk and specialist needs, such as safeguarding and crisis intervention, while others are more open-access by supporting prevention, early intervention, and community engagement. However, other hubs function as shared workspaces to facilitate collaboration among public professionals within or across organizations. The examples indicate that hubs exist along a continuum from closed and specialist arrangements to open and inclusive models. Hubs also increasingly extend beyond physical co-location, with digital and hybrid 'virtual hub' models emerging as a distinct and under-examined variant.

Lastly, while this PMM theme focuses on hub terminology, we also recognize that comparable organizational arrangements may be described using alternative labels, including one-stop shops and integrated service centres. Similar organizational forms can also be identified internationally, including Orange Door hubs (Australia), Huduma centres (Kenya) and multi-service centres (USA). However, comparatively little is known about how hub or similar concepts are interpreted and applied beyond Western policy settings. We therefore welcome contributions that are in the spirit of hub working, but may use a different word.

What are we looking for?

As a theme situated within Public Money & Management (PMM), we are especially keen to receive submissions that engage with the financial and resourcing dimensions of hub working. Hubs are frequently promoted through a rhetoric of seamless collaboration, yet their establishment and survival depend on pooled budgets, commissioning arrangements, procurement rules, and short-term or precarious funding cycles that receive comparatively little scholarly attention. We therefore welcome articles examining how hubs are funded and financially sustained, how procurement and commissioning processes shape (or constrain) collaborative intent, and how the value for money and outcomes of hub models can be credibly evaluated.

Overall, there remains a need for greater conceptual clarity regarding what constitutes a hub, how hubs differ from other forms of collaborative organization, and what forms of value they create. We invite submissions that critically examine the meaning, characteristics and purposes of the hub approach to public services.

This PMM theme calls for research that advances our understanding of public service delivery hubs and related organizational forms. Contributions may examine how hubs are designed, implemented, governed, and evaluated across different public service settings and jurisdictions. 

Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Conceptualizing and defining public service delivery hubs
• The evolution of hub-based approaches across public services
• Hub forms, hybridity, and access
• Governance, leadership, and management of hubs
• Information sharing and inter-professional working in hubs
• Funding, commissioning and financial sustainability of hub models
• Hub user experiences, accessibility, and equity
• Public value creation in hub models
• Evaluating hub outcomes and value for money
• Challenges and unintended consequences of hubs
• Global hub perspectives