Quantification en gestion publique: l’argumentaire de la défense

Some wag has said that the role of academic research is to prove that what works in practice cannot work in theory! That used to be a much better joke before I rejoined the ranks of academe. But as far as results measurement and performance management are concerned, it has at least a grain of truth. Despite all of the theoretical hand-wringing, there are some concrete examples where performance measurement has yielded interesting and promising results. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons two other leading scholars of comparative public management, Geert Bouckaert and John Halligan, concluded in a recent study that: “long-term trends now appear to support the ascendancy of performance ideas as a dominant force in public management” (Bouckaert and Halligan, 2008: 1; Halligan, 2008: 3).

Rather than add to the already ample theoretical literature on measurement in public management, I propose in this paper to review four specific cases where results measurement has been used in fruitful ways and which illustrate both its current role and future potential in public management. However I should mention right away – in the interest of full disclosure! – that I had a role in developing three of them. So I am not entirely unbiased about them.

Public sector service delivery

The first example is public sector service delivery in Canada. Twenty or even fifteen years ago, the improvement of service delivery was all over the map. Some public sector managers were pursuing something called service quality, some believed in service standards, and some in other things. But whatever the virtues of these various approaches, they were all means to an end. And no one could tell whether they were actually achieving that end, whatever it might be.

By the mid-1990s, there was a widespread feeling that all of this worthwhile public sector effort lacked rigour and focus. It was not clear that it was actually achieving results. There was no way to know whether all this well-meaning effort was directed to the right things, or was making a real difference. By 1997, it appeared that something else was needed if the Canadian public sector was to achieve a significant improvement in public sector service delivery.

As a result, a kind of intergovernmental “summit” of public sector leaders of service delivery and service policy was held in Ottawa, for two days in early July 1997, involving thirty-five senior service “champions” from across the Canadian public sector, together with knowledgeable academics. The participants from all three levels of government, and most regions of the country, concluded that the public sector in Canada and elsewhere had so far taken a largely “inside-out” approach to service improvement, with little input from citizens as to their service needs, or their priorities for improvement;

1. the public sector had no real idea how satisfied Canadians were with public sector service delivery; and
   
2. that citizen satisfaction should be used as the results measure for service delivery in the public sector – as the end or outcome for which all the other things were just the means or outputs.