Many performance management frameworks at local level in European countries focus on measuring service improvements and internally-focused measures of organisational performance in local governments. In the UK this tendency has been reinforced by the service-oriented Best Value regime imposed upon local government by central government and the various inspection processes. At the same time, many local authorities in the UK are looking to institute 'citizen-led performance reviews', not unlike the citizen-led benchmarking reports which are common in US communities. However, there is still a reluctance to make these reviews more community-oriented by including performance measures of 'quality of life' and cross-cutting issues, partly because politicians and top managers are reluctant to take responsibility for areas in which they have only rather indirect influence. This paper examines the emergence of the public governance paradigm and explores ways in which it might be operationalised. It then reports the results of an international project undertaken by Governance International in Germany, Spain, Switzerland and the UK to evaluate the quality of local governance through a series of quantitative and qualitative analyses. The paper highlights the main patterns emerging from this study and explores the implications of these patterns for local governance in other international contexts. The paper suggests that performance management frameworks at local government level should place much greater emphasis on the achievements in the field of local governance, rather than simply the achievements of local governments. In this way, efforts in performance measurement in public services could be redirected away from 'blame-dumping' between stakeholders and towards 'mutual solution-finding'. Furthermore, performance measurement processes could incorporate the key governance principles of multi-stakeholder co-operation and transparency of decision-making. The future of local performance reporting is more likely to lie in arming multiple stakeholders for their debates about 'what is to be done' than in 'proving' what has been done.

Inglés