Elke Löffler

Evaluating the Quality of Public Governance: Indicators, Models and Methodologies

This article provides an overview for this special issue on the evaluation of the quality of public governance. It charts the move in the public sector during the 1990s from concern largely with excellence in service delivery to a concern for good governance. It examines what we mean by governance and ‘good governance’ and the dimensions of ‘good public governance’. It demonstrates that there is now widespread interest in measuring not only the quality of services but also improvements in quality of life and improvements in governance processes. It discusses how measures of good governance are being used in different contexts around the world. Finally, it considers how the measurement of good governance can be encouraged, e.g. through awards, inspections, setting funding conditions and empowering stakeholders to demand better evidence.

Benchmarking and performance measurement in public sectors

Given the prevailing emphasis on agency performance, customer focus, stakeholder’s interests and other methods of assessment under new public administration and prevailing managerialism in many public sectors around the world, administrative practitioners have taken to benchmarking as an instrument for assessing organizational performance and for facilitating management transfer and learning from other benchmarked organizations. The introduction of benchmarking into the public sector is still in its early stages. Technical problems, scepticism about usefulness and the appropriateness of transferring putative private sector competencies into public administration and the resistance in accepting organizational change as a necessary consequence of benchmarking exercises in the public sector, prevent the widespread acceptance and use of benchmarking in public sectors, arguably “punch‐drunk” with systemic change. Nevertheless, there are some encouraging examples of benchmarking within the public sector. This paper critically analyzes these examples in order to establish the vulnerability points of such measurement instruments which, possibly, need more research in order to establish the specific learning dimensions to benchmarking and to illustrate the importance of such benchmarking and learning within the highly risky, information technology (IT)‐driven experiences of systems development and failure.

Moving from excellence models of local service delivery to benchmarking 'good local governance'

improvements. One important instrument of local government reforms has been benchmarking. Compared to the realm of national public administration, benchmarking at the local level is methodologically relatively easy and not as politically contentious. Local services are usually benchmarked against some generic excellence model or compared to the service provision of similar local authorities. However, most of the benchmarking criteria, models and methods which are currently available and which are being used to assess local service delivery no longer suit the needs of localities. Good local management implies high performance not only in managing local services so that they satisfy customers and taxpayers but also in enabling local communities to solve their own problems and to create better futures for their stakeholders. The article suggests that local government reforms need to go beyond the improvement of local service delivery. Calling upon the international experience of innovation in local governance, the article distils a series of benchmarking criteria which might be applied to define and identify ‘good local governance’.

More quality through competitive quality awards? An impact assessment framework

Given the growing international phenomenon of quality award competitions for public sector services and organizations it is timely to assess their impacts. While award schemes have become a popular marketing tool to increase the visibility of award organizers, it is unclear what impact they have on various dimensions of quality — organizational quality, service quality and the quality of life of citizens. So far, quality awards are a theory-free area with few evaluations being undertaken by the academic community. By the same token, quality awards organizers have not shown a great inclination to invest in impact assessments. Yet, major questions exist on the extent to which quality awards live up to their claims to help applicants and non-applicants to improve quality. This article maps existing pieces of evidence against an impact assessment framework and identifies the research gaps to be addressed by the academic community and public sector organizations. Points for practitioners Competitive quality awards can have benefits in terms of innovation, organizational learning, and reputational promotion. However, for the applicants these benefits come at a price — the innovations and the learning only occur if the organization undertakes the application in a way which builds these benefits into the process. Moreover, the promotional benefits depend on which awards they win, particularly on how well publicized they are. For organizers, too, a cost—benefit calculus is necessary — while competitive awards may be cheaper to organize than accreditation schemes, they may not lead to such careful preparation, with consequently lower impacts.

Obstacles to the administrative modernization process in Germany

Abstract According to two surveys of the German Association of Cities among its members in 1994/95 and 1996, the number of medium-sized and big cities pursuing administrative modernization is impressive and still rising. Yet, the data also point out implementation problems of the new steering model, which is the German variation of new public management. First, financial crisis is the most common reform motive. This implies that most reformers rather focus on ‘hard’ management areas like financial management and neglect human resource management. Secondly, the data give evidence that the new steering model still has a critical mass of scepticism in local government councils. As a consequence, the re-engineering of the relationship between the administrative staff and local council members is very much deficitary. Also decentralized resource management usually boils down to the reduction of household titles and lump-sum budget cuts. This raises many questions on the democratic accountability of local government reforms in Germany.

Critical Book Review

In spite of an ever-increasing production of case studies on innovation in public management we still know very little about the conditions that are conducive to public sector innovation. Nevertheless, this type of knowledge is vital for the practitioner who wants to know whether any reported ‘best practice’ innovation can be replicated and successfully implemented at home. Thus, this book may be evaluated on whether it facilitates the transfer of best practice in public management. Of course, the book also has to be evaluated in terms of its contribution to the existing research in New Public Management. Sandford Borins’ study on public sector innovation is a novelty itself because he engaged in ‘serious hypothesis-testing rather than just more hypothesis-generation’ as Alan D. Altshuler puts it in his foreword. His impressive empirical study draws from the applications to the Ford Foundation–Kennedy School of Government’s State and Local Government innovations awards. Borins limits his pool to the 217 innovative public programs reaching the semifinal round (about the top 5 percent of applicants) between 1990 and 1994. The semifinalists are chosen on the basis of the novelty of the innovation, its significance in addressing an important problem of both local and national concern, the value it brings to its clients and other citizens and its transferability. What were the main results of the quantitative analysis of the completed award questionnaires? Before dealing with more specific issues, Borins analyses the characteristics of the public sector innovations based on the descriptions provided by the applicants. One major finding is that innovations were most frequently holistic, meaning that the innovators ‘took a systems approach to problem solving, or coordinated the activities of several organizations to deal with a