Local public service productivity and performance measurement

Abstract

A premise of new public management (NPM) is that productivity in public services is lower than the private sector, justifying the transfer of tools and techniques born in private sector manufacturing. Our focus is on public service effectiveness i.e. performance, while recognising that efficiency is always important. We believe attention to effectiveness will grow since new public governances (NPG; Osborne et al., 2010, 2015) including the service management perspective (Normann, 2002) are likely to result in new performance metrics including innovative ways of cross-departmental and inter-organisational working to deliver integrated services. The purpose of this conceptual paper is to suggest a new performance framework for evaluating local public service productivity and performance: efficiency and effectiveness. We follow Carrillo and Batra (2012) in rejecting the reduction of performance simply to financial metrics. Our contribution is to suggest ways in which public value as a metric of performance can be measured by socially (and contextually) migrating public values into performance value.

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