ter Henk Bogt

Financial and economic management in autonomized Dutch public organisations

Alongside with the introduction of New Public Management, many governmental organizations in the Netherlands were autonomized. The aim of this paper is to analyze the changes in financial and economic management that accompanied these autonomizations. Case research was carried out in six public organizations. The financial management of these organizations improved somewhat after the autonomization. However, there were hardly any real changes in the economic management. The paper gives an overview of the changes in financial and economic management. It also discusses what factors might have prevented the realization of the planned changes in the (financial and) economic management.

The application of businesslike planning and control in local government : A field study of eight Dutch municipalities

The Policy and Management Instruments (PMI) project, an initiative of central government in the Netherlands, aimed at familiarising local authorities with new ways of governance and management. This article is a cross-sectional study of the application of planning and control techniques in eight Dutch municipalities. It addresses five issues: (1) the extent to which the goals of the PMI project have been realised; (2) the information to be included in the planning and control documents; (3) the value of replacing a uniform output-oriented control framework by differentiated control; (4) whether organisational units are more committed to self-developed than to centrally developed control systems; (5) whether success depends not only on the introduction of adequate instruments, but also on other factors. It ends with an attempt to show possible relationships between these issues for the eight municipalities.

Challenging the NPM Ideas about performance management

This paper shows how the performance budget of a local government organization, in this case a province in the Netherlands, can be attuned to the specific task characteristics of the programmes in these budgets. Three ways of alignment are suggested: differentiating between standardized and complex programmes; focussing on the politically most relevant programmes in order to avoid information overload; and distinguishing between the types of performance information in terms of the role of the province in the programme (facilitator versus executor) and the stage in the policy making cycle (policy development, policy elaboration or policy execution). These suggestions challenge the generally straightforward NPM rationale of performance budgeting, in which standardized outputs are directly related to resources. Our empirical research shows on the one hand that the redesigned programme budget based on the above principles received substantial approval of its users, i.e., the provincial councillors. On the other hand, as regards the use of this programme budget the picture is rather diffuse, i.e., the majority of the councillors indicate that they use the information rather intensively, but its formal use in official Council and Council committee meetings remains limited.