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Introduction

Document Cited in Related
Vincent
Date01 September 2003
AuthorTony Bovaird,Elke Löffler
Published date01 September 2003
DOI10.1177/0020852303693001
Subject MatterIntroduction
/tmp/tmp-181jWR2rYIP5OO/input 02_IRAS69/3 articles 15/8/03 10:37 am Page 311
Introduction
Tony Bovaird and Elke Löffler
This symposium on ‘Evaluating the Quality of Governance’ tackles an issue
which is of increasing concern for the public sector around the world. Our motiva-
tion in bringing together this symposium was the recognition that there is a
mismatch between recent public governance reforms, particularly in OECD coun-
tries, and the available performance measurement tools and models. While many
public sector reforms, in particular at local levels, go beyond the improvement of
service delivery, conventional performance measurement approaches still focus
almost exclusively on ‘value for money’ or service quality. We do not wish to
suggest that the measurement of efficiency of service delivery and customer satis-
faction services provided has become obsolete. However, we believe that such
measures capture only one part of the current public sector modernization agenda
in OECD countries.
Of course, just because public governance issues are now seen as much more
central to the debate on the proper role of government, the state and the public
sector than was the case even a decade ago does not imply that progress towards
‘good governance’ needs to be measured. Indeed, there are influential practi-
tioners and academics who believe that the achievement of ‘good governance’
either cannot be measured or is too much trouble to measure. Given the difficul-
ties experienced in recent decades in measuring service quality and organizational
excellence, many researchers think that any attempt to ‘measure’ the quality of
public governance is bound to fail. Certainly there is currently no ‘scientifically-
sound’ model to assess the quality of public governance.
However, as interest in ‘good governance’ spreads, it is inevitable that attempts
are made to explore how to operationalize it and to test whether it can be empiri-
cally demonstrated. As the papers gathered for this symposium show, there are
now...

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