"Provas Reaplicadas"

Performance and accountability:

Making government work

Governments have always been keen to achieve results, but calls to improve public sector performance in OECD countries have become particularly loud and insistent over the last couple of decades.

Reasons include increasing claims on public expenditure, particularly pensions, healthcare and education, expectations of higher quality public services in line with rising living standards and, in many cases, reluctance on the part of citizens to pay ever higher taxes. Government also has to be more competitive in the face of other potential suppliers in areas like transport, communications and energy. It must show it can do the job it sets out to do.

That is why governments across the OECD have responded by setting goals and shifting the emphasis of government management and budgeting away from how much money to spend towards what is actually being achieved. New Zealand was among the first to adopt this results-oriented budgeting and management approach in the late 1980s, and was followed in the 1990s by Canada, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Sweden, the UK and the US. Later, Austria, Germany and Switzerland launched similar moves, and Turkey has recently begun a pilot phase of this process.

At the same time, these developments have pushed governments to modernise their accountability and control procedures. In particular, over the last 15 years or so, OECD governments have been engaged in reviewing and reforming the ways in which they keep control over large and complex operations in public services and how those responsible are held to account. Technological innovation and changes in the size and structure of government, in part reflecting privatisation and decentralisation, are also playing an important role in fostering these developments.

But these initiatives have by no means run their course, and their widespread implementation gives rise to some fundamental questions. What is meant by performance in the public service context, and how can it best be measured? Should a service be judged by, say, its accessibility or its financial cost, and who should do the judging? How can moves to increase the managerial responsibilities and decision-making powers of public servants be reconciled with democratic control and effective auditing procedures?

It is clearly not enough to argue that a reform works because it is based on sound research, or on an accepted procedure, or indeed that the government spent billions on its implementation. The main challenge is how to make reforms achieve their goal. This is the basic idea underlying performance-oriented budgeting and management: to shift the emphasis away from controlling inputs and towards achieving results. However, OECD countries are at different stages in this process and approaches to implementation vary.

Note: The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is celebrating its 50th anniversary, but its roots go back to the rubble of Europe after World War II. Determined to avoid the mistakes of their predecessors in the wake of World War I, European leaders realised that the best way to ensure lasting peace was to encourage co-operation and reconstruction, rather than punish the defeated.

(adapted from http://www.oecd.org)

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