Evaluating the Quality of Public Governance: Indicators, Models and Methodologies
| Author | Tony Bovaird,Elke Löffler |
| DOI | 10.1177/0020852303693002 |
| Published date | 01 September 2003 |
| Date | 01 September 2003 |
| Subject Matter | Journal Article |
Evaluating the quality of public governance: indicators,
models and methodologies
Tony Bovaird and Elke Löffler
Abstract
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.
Introduction
This article provides an overview for this symposium issue on the evaluation of
the quality of public governance. It sets out a conceptual framework within which
international developments in the measurement of public governance can be
understood.
The article begins by charting 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 dis-
cusses how measures of good governance are being used in different contexts
around the world. 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. Finally, the authors present
an innovative approach to the evaluation of public governance which is currently
being piloted internationally.
Tony Bovaird is Professor of Strategy and Public Services Management, Bristol Business
School, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK and Elke Löffler is Chief
Executive, Governance International, UK. CDU: 65.012.3.
International Review of Administrative Sciences [0020–8523(200309)69:3]
Copyright © 2003 IIAS. SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New
Delhi), Vol. 69 (2003), 313–328; 036081
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International Review of Administrative Sciences 69(3)
From excellence in service delivery to good governance?
Excellence in public service delivery was one of the key themes of international
public sector reforms in the 1980s and 1990s. A large battery of approaches has
been built up to help governments with service improvement. Some of these are
legislative (Bovaird and Halachmi, 2001), e.g. the Government Performance
Results Act (GPRA) in the USA, Best Value in the UK or the Bassanini reforms
in Italy. However, others are essentially voluntaristic — e.g. use of the EFQM
(European Foundation for Quality Management) Excellence model and other
quality management systems.
There is no single view on what ‘quality’ means in this context but a number of
main approaches can be discerned:
• conformance to specification (ISO 9000, contract culture),
• fit for purpose (meeting corporate and social objectives, Balanced Score-
card I),
• aligning inputs, processes, outputs and outcomes (EFQM, Balanced Score-
card II),
• meeting or exceeding customer expectations (the Servqual instrument
decribed in Zeithaml et al. [1990]) and
• producing emotional, passionate commitment on the part of users (Pirsig,
1974).
However, governments now realize that, while excellent service delivery
remains important, it is not sufficient (Bovaird and Löffler, 2002). This is partly
because the application of these models of service excellence has thrown up the
existence of ‘wicked problems’ which do not lend themselves to solution simply
by service improvement in each of the agencies concerned.
For instance, in Germany, many public agencies have had to seek new
approaches to reducing local social welfare expenditure. Because of the effects of
the long-running economic recession in Germany, the ‘lean state’ reform move-
ment, which has introduced more flexible and results-oriented resource manage-
ment systems, has not been enough to contain expenditure within dwindling local
resource levels. Recently, schools in the City of Arnsberg have implemented an
innovative programme with associations of foreign residents to support foreign-
born children and their families in learning German. Local statistics have shown
that foreign-born children are much more likely to leave school without qualifica-
tions than German-born children, which means that they face great difficulty
entering the training system and in finding a job. By working with organizations
in civil society to improve the language skills of children of Turkish origin,
Arnsberg expects that not only will school results improve but also fewer of the
children will later become unemployed or social welfare recipients.
Moreover, it has emerged that even when citizens and other stakeholders
believe services are good, they do not necessarily express greater trust in the
governments concerned — and when services improve, trust does not necessarily
rise (Performance and Improvement Unit, 2002: 22).
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Bovaird and Löffler: Evaluating the quality of governance
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As a consequence, it has become clear that a public organization cannot be
judged only on the excellence of its services — it also has to be excellent in the
way it exercises its political, environmental and social responsibilities. As this
has become clear, a new generation of government reforms has already started
which may be labelled ‘public governance’ reforms.
The move to public governance
After the decade of dominance by New Public Management (npm), i.e. the mid-
1980s to the mid-1990s, in which many initiatives were launched around the
world in accordance with its principles, it became evident that there was increas-
ing dissatisfaction with its limited focus. This dissatisfaction arose from several
sources:
• ‘Wicked problems’ were clearly not adequately solved by public sector orga-
nizations, even those which were ‘economical, efficient and effective’ — indeed,
such problems were not even solved when all public services were delivered at
high quality.
• Partnerships with the private sector were increasingly seen as more important
than relationships based on antagonistic contracting procedures. Indeed, success-
ful partnerships working with all organizations, in whichever sector they were
based, were increasingly seen as being reliant on trust.
• The role of citizens, as conceived in npm, was increasingly recognized to be
too thin and ‘consumerist’ — they were expected to be consulted as service users
but their role as members of communities which co-planned, co-designed and
co-managed public initiatives was largely ignored or undervalued.
• In most countries, the major scandals in relation to government performance
were often not about low service performance but about failures in the way
government carried out its tasks (both politicians and officials), for example, in
relation to the extent to which citizens and other stakeholders were fully informed
about the background to decisions made and in relation to the honesty and fairness
of politicians and staff.
• The long-term sustainability of economic, social and environmental policies
was seen to require an alignment of all strategies and policies — not only within
agencies but also between agencies and between sectors. This also meant that all
service decisions had to be evaluated against the priorities of the organization as
a whole and of the partnerships in which it was involved — no longer could
services be designed and delivered simply in order to achieve service-specific
objectives.
What we understand by ‘governance’
It is striking that there are many more definitions of ‘good governance’ than of
the underlying concepts of ‘governance’ and ‘public governance’. While social
scientists continue to argue about an appropriate definition of governance, how-
ever, practitioners have appeared much less concerned — e.g. in the case of npm,
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practitioners generally have ignored the terminology behind the concepts and
simply pushed forward with their practice.
We start from the belief that any definition of public governance has to be
context-specific and is likely, therefore, to differ between stakeholders and
between countries. However, for our purposes in this article, we will use a specific
definition of public governance which makes it particularly easy to explore
how different stakeholders can be involved appropriately in the evaluation of the
quality of public governance (Governance International, 2003). It will become
clear that other definitions of governance will entail some modifications of the
approach outlined here. Later in the article we discuss some examples of this.
We understand public governance to be
the ways in which stakeholders interact with each other in order to influence the out-
comes of public...
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