From Performance Budgeting to Performance Budget Management: Theory and Practice

This article examines the decades‐long practices of performance budgeting in different countries and their associated challenges from a multilayered institutional framework. Based on theory and lessons learned, the article recommends an array of strategies to address institutional and organizational barriers. It also proposes to reconceptualize performance budgeting as a performance budget management system and suggests how multiyear budget planning, financial risk assessment, policy planning, the departmental budget cycle, the program budget cycle, stakeholder engagement, regular spending reviews, and performance audits should be integrated more closely to address the long‐term fiscal challenges faced by many governments and to respond to the public pressure on agencies to do more with less.     

From Cash to Accrual Budgeting and Accounting in the Public Sector: The Dutch Experience

Traditionally, governments used to deploy input‐based budgeting systems and cash‐based accounting systems. However, these systems do not provide the information that is necessary for a government to operate efficiently and effectively. Therefore, a growing number of countries have already shifted or are planning to shift from cash‐based to some form of accrual accounting in the public sector. Usually, the implementation of some accrual‐based system is linked to wider financial management reforms including performance management requiring information on cost. This paper focuses on the Dutch experience with the shift from cash‐based accounting and budgeting systems to an accrual‐based system.     

Better Performance with Performance Budgeting? Analyzing Cases of Success and Failure in Public Administrations

ABSTRACT

The introduction of performance budgeting has substantially changed the working environment of public managers. Changes include a shift from input to outcome orientation as well as more freedom to manage. However, current public management theories are unable to explain why performance budgeting sometimes fails. This article proposes a causal model that integrates three contextual factors and two individual factors in order to explain the diverse results. The model is tested with cases generated from interviews with Swiss public managers. The compiled data suggests that the type of tasks in a department as an antecedent variable and the perceived freedom of public managers have a dominating influence on the perceived reform outcome. Other factors, such as the behavior of the legislature, the project management and the prior career of managers, tend to be less important. These results contribute to the scientific discourse about success factors for performance budgeting in public administrations.     

THE CORPORATE MANAGEMENT FRAMEWORK AS ADMINISTRATIVE SCIENCE: A CRITIQUE

Abstract: A corporate management framework has been the basis for a transformation of Australian public administration in recent years. Program budgeting, corporate planning, performance contracts, program evaluation and new forms of efficiency scrutiny are among the techniques introduced. They stem from a dominant paradigm of technical and instrumental rationality, within which a framework of practical remedies and technologies of power carries the corporate management label. Four concepts underly this framework and its techniques: the product format, instrumentalism, integration and purposive action. The framework has fundamental problems. The product format is inappropriate for many public services and overvalues quantifiable, single-purpose outputs while denigrating claims of worth and effectiveness made on non-economic grounds; instrumentalism ignores the political dimensions of public organisations; integration denies the value of decentralised forms of service development and delivery and, paradoxically, contradicts current private management precepts; and purposive action displays an unwarranted optimism about the potency of technical rationality under central direction. The four principles must be reviewed as offering few prospects for genuine and lasting reform.     

TEACHING PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION: EDUCATION OR TRAINING?*

Abstract: There is an ambivalence in attitudes to public administration as a field of study among both academics and practitioners in Australia. Teachers, researchers, students, public servants seeking training and managers have differing interests and expectations. Disagreements about the field have contributed to the lack of a unified framework of concepts, while the field has fragmented into public administration, public policy and public management, aside from other divisions such as "old" versus "new" public administration. "Education" and "training" have taken diverging paths and academics and practitioners have drifted apart. There needs to be a closer dialogue that can only be based on a generally agreed paradigm for Australian Public Administration as a field of study.     

The Numbers Wonk as Existential Hero

Did you think there was once a golden age of honest budgeting? Well, it wasn't in Britain before or during World War I, according to a classic novel about the period. The novelist Ford Madox Ford placed the hero of his tale in a government career in statistics and budgeting. It seems like a strange choice for a hero, but the dilemmas of that career are the conditions against which the protagonist must struggle to maintain his integrity.     

Decentralization,local governance and ‘recentralization’ in Africa

Although Many African states have pursued substantial decentralization reforms in the previous twenty years, many of these reforms are still experiencing problems in bringing about effective local governance. Often these problems grow from the difficulty in translating general reform initiatives into specific working arrangements at the local level that are effective in several key processes and operations. Specifically these include planning and capital investment, budgeting and fiscal management, personnel systems and management, and finance and revenue. A combination of central reluctance to relinquish authority in these key areas and the complexity of organizational redesign to support decentralization seem to explain these problems. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Planning and budgeting in Pakistan

Twenty years ago a pioneering study of planning and budgeting in Pakistan pointed to significant weaknesses. This article reviews the changes made subsequently to the formal processes and assesses how these are currently working. The planning agency is now a permanent organization. Planning and budgeting have been combined and these processes have moved closer to the centre of political power. On the other hand there are difficulties over linking planning and budgeting to the management of economic and fiscal policy; planning is geared to securing foreign aid funds; the planning processes favour large expensive projects which emerge from the more developed areas of the country and discriminate against the smaller projects with a shorter time horizon needed in less developed provinces–thus accentuating economic imbalances. Finally, although the importance of evaluation is recognized, in practice reporting and evaluation are not adequately practised.     

PBB in American Local Governments: It's More than a Management Tool

Despite academic findings that performance information seldom is used in appropriations decisions, many professional organizations and governments continue to press for integrating performance information into local public management, planning, and budgeting processes. Is it possible to reconcile such inconsistencies? Looking beyond the executive–legislative relationship and departmental appropriations, the author examines the budget implications of applying performance information at the subdepartmental program level. Case analysis of Indianapolis’s IndyStat initiative underscores that performance measurement application is positively related to intradepartmental program budget changes. Hence, performance‐based budgeting (PBB) can improve local budgeting despite severe political constraints. Still, successful use of PBB requires strong executive leadership, and its effects remain less visible at the departmental level or within the wider political arena of legislative bargaining. The author concludes by recommending some rethinking of the current analytical focus of PBB both in future research as well as recommended practice.     

The Evolution of Local Government Budgeting in Poland: From Accounting to Policy in a Leap and a Bound

The evolution of U.S. public budgeting has been described by Schick (1966) as a progression from a control orientation to a management and then a planning orientation. Lee (1992) has tracked the evolution of central budgeting staff largely from a group of accountants to a more varied set of backgrounds, dominated by public administration and general liberal arts educations. As Poland decentralizes fiscal and administrative responsibilities and powers to gminas (local self-governments), the gmina councils are beginning to view the budget as more than a financial accounting tool proscribed and prescribed by the central government. They are beginning to see the potential for using the budget as a policy and management tool. The evolutionary transformation of budgeting, which took fifty years in the United States, may take only five years in Poland. The evidence for this metamorphosis is based on interviews with several gmina city budgeters, with special attention devoted to the city of Lublin.     

Revitalizing public management training in the Americas

The decade of the 1980s signalled major changes within public administration and development-oriented activities. As a consequence of the internationalization of the agendas of practitioners and academics working in these areas, there is today a growing convergence among public policy, public management, public administration and political science. Given the complexity of the public sector cross-nationally, what has become necessary in public management education is the design of programmes that meet specific needs and priorities and which are responsive to very different national settings. This particular case study is centred around one endeavour to achieve more effective interfacing between theory and practice, in the teaching of public management and the design of development programmes in the United States (US). It is based on an assessment of a 10-year co-operative endeavour between the National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration and the US Agency for International Development. The outcomes of this project provided not only leverage for important changes in the teaching programmes of schools concerned with international management education but also built a new relationship between government and a non-governmental organization through the contacting out of management development work.     

Is the U.S. Congress an Insurmountable Obstacle to Any “Far‐Sighted Conception of Budgeting”?

In recent years, Congress has recurrently failed to meet its minimum responsibilities in federal budgeting. This article analyzes whether it is possible to repair this problem, using concepts popularized by Allen Schick in his influential article “The Road to PPB.” His article compared the PPB reform effort to the history of budget process reforms that started with the design of the executive budget. It publicized a logical sequence of budget process improvements that started with control and then advanced through management and planning. The article did not substantially address the role of Congress, but eight years after it was published, Congress reasserted its constitutional role in the budget process. Its record of performance since then has ranged from mixed to dysfunctional. The Congress has been criticized for budgetary delays, micromanagement, myopia, procrastination, indiscipline, and an inability to prioritize intelligently. If these faults are set in stone, then an integrated system of budgeting, as described in “The Road to PPB” and related work, is unattainable. On the other hand, if reform of Congressional budgeting is politically feasible, improvements to that system can utilize the unique contributions that a legislature can make to a good system of budgeting.     

Symposium on public management teform in New Zealand:: Reflections on the international public management network/victoria university workshop

The genesis of the workshop on public management reform in New Zealand, held in Wellington on March 10, 2000, was an invitation from the International Public Management Network to the Graduate School of Business and Government Management at Victoria University to organize and co-host a one-day event in Wellington following the Network’s Sydney 2000 Conference. Approximately sixty people attended the workshop. The majority of attendees were senior public servants in the New Zealand government. In addition, there was a representation of academics from New Zealand and Network members who came on from the IPMN conference in Sydney at Macquarie Graduate School of Management March 4–6.The mix of speakers was strongly weighted towards practitioners, as is reflected in the articles in this symposium. The three central agency contributions are all from officials who have a reputation for thinking creatively and critically about the future of New Zealand public management, Derek Gill, Andrew Kibblewhite and Anne Neale. Graham Scott kindly agreed to provide the keynote address. Robert Gregory, a well-known critic of the New Zealand reforms, was the sole academic voice in this small chorus of practitioners. Gregory would be the last to claim that he is “representative” of anyone’s opinion other than his own.     

Observations on the State of Comparative Administration Research in Europe — Rather Comparable than Comparative

This article tries to review public administration research undertaken in Europe since about 1980. As there is little comparative research, an attempt is made to systematize comparable research along three dimensions: organization structures (macro and micro), meta-policymaking as it refers to budgeting and planning procedures, and research about personnel and personnel policy. It is observed that neo-conservative reform policies in the Anglo-American countries have had a noticeable impact on the orientation of academic research. Subsequently, these policies not only affected macro-structures by privatization and decentralization measures, but also gave meta-policymaking a characteristic turn, quite as it tried to induce a more managerialist role understanding in the civil service. It is argued in favor of more basic research and the institutionalization of administrative monitoring on the national level as well as stronger cooperation on the international level to advance comparative research beyond secondary analysis of the incidentally comparable.     

Civil Service Reforms in Italy: The Importance of External Endorsement and Administrative Leadership

The traditional portrait of civil servants in Italy, as well as in most other countries, has always been one of not particularly efficient employees yet have the benefit of a secure job and can look forward to a comfortable retirement package. In order to change this image, public management reforms have largely focused on civil servants since the 1990s. However, many academics and practitioners claim some inertia in the reform implementation. In this article we aim to identify the determinants of such inertia in Italy's civil service reforms and we analyze data from 885 Italian municipalities expected to adopt the pay system reform for senior officials, as required by national legislature. Our findings stress the importance of accrued legitimacy, external public endorsement, and the influence of key internal stakeholders (like administrative leaders) as major vehicles to promote or slow down the implementation of administrative reforms in the public sector.     

Trends in the Study of Public Administration: Empirical and Qualitative Observations from Public Administration Review, 2000–2009

What are the apparent research and methodological trends in PAR’s content over the past decade? From the perspective of the journal’s 70‐year history, with its aim to “mesh” practitioner and academic knowledge creation, topical coverage since 2000 reflects striking continuity, emphasizing many of the “bread and butter” administrative issues such as planning, human resources, budgeting, and public management. A marked increase in coverage is apparent in the application of more sophisticated quantitative statistical methodology, as well as in the number of female authors, while the number of practitioner authors declined sharply. Throughout the first turbulent decade of the twenty‐first century, three intellectual themes stood out: evaluations of New Public Management, connections between practitioners and academicians, and responsiveness to immediate social, economic, and political challenges. Given the constant demand for usable knowledge, scholars seem to have marginalized attention to the historical context and epistemological foundations of the study. The central challenge in the years ahead will be to effectively use research methods in response to the big questions of government and society that defy measurement. Since many [empiricists], especially the younger, do not know very much about epistemology, they tend to be quite dogmatic about the one set of canons that dominate them. —C. Wright Mills, 1959     

Managing organizations in the third world: A case study of management control in a Bangladeshi jute mill

This article reports on a study of the operation of management control systems in a large nationalized jute mill of Bangladesh. The study seeks to describe how ‘control’ operated in practice and to explain why the systems of control worked in these ways. Investigations revealed a number of significant factors. First, the organization operated in both competitive and regulated environments; it had little authority over its operational activities and, head office and the sponsoring ministry were prominent in organizational planning and control. Second, the accounting system in the mill was mainly a response to external legitimacy (e.g. stewardship and tax matters). Third, although budgeting was perceived as part of the formal structure of control, it was not a dominant mode of control in the organization; the budgeting system was created to comply with head office and state requirements. Fourthly, the mill managers used a variety of social/informal control and mechanisms to cope with the complexity and uncertainty around the mill's operations. This study reinforces the conclusions of other research claiming that the wider social, economic, political and institutional contexts govern the ways management control operates in an organization.     

PAR’s Social Equity Footprint

During the 75th anniversary of Public Administration Review (PAR), this article examines the social equity scholarship published in PAR from 1940 to 2013. Less than 5 percent of all articles published in PAR since its inception focus on social equity. The articles published in PAR are primarily concentrated within the areas of personnel and public policy. Very few articles were published in the areas of budgeting or ethics. While social equity scholarship published in PAR has made a valuable contribution to understanding the career inequities of women and minorities in the public sector, scholars and professionals need to more thoroughly examine the black box of agency practice and structural inequities to examine why they persist. The challenge for future social equity research in public administration is to examine broader dimensions of equity and to understand how social inequities in administration can be mitigated.     

Pitfalls of Contracting for Policy Advice: Preparing Performance Budgeting Reform in Estonia

The goal of this article is to analyze the challenges involved in contracting for policy advice with the example of performance budgeting reform in Estonia in 2009–2011. The Estonian Ministry of Finance has sought to prepare a major change in the budgeting system by outsourcing the analytical preparation of different aspects of the reform to various private sector organizations. The case study seeks to identify the challenges and pitfalls involved in contracting for policy and management advice in the area of a major public sector reform. The Estonian experience shows that such a reform strategy can run into serious problems, including fragmented and inconsistent reform plan, limited learning, and high transaction costs. The contractualization of reform preparation has constrained deliberations on the planned changes to the strategic planning and budgeting system among the stakeholders and undermined the democratic legitimacy of the reform.