problem of chronic indebtedness. Faith in government may also have been
eroded as cutbacks led to an erosion of service quality in the public sector.
In the late 1980s, governments began responding to the twin problems
of indebtedness and an erosion in citizen trust by placing more emphasis on
the need to identify and report on performance measures for government
programs. The idea of encouraging a results orientation within government
became a key component of the new paradigm (OECD 1996) for restructuring
public sectors that had become established in many nations. The idea
itself was not new: it had precedents stretching back to the use of planning,
programming, and budgeting systems (PPBS) in the 1960s.But the attention
given to this idea in the 1990s in terms of governments’ communication with
nongovernmental stakeholders was new. Governments not only encouraged
more emphasis on results in internal administrative arrangements; they also
went out of their way to show external audiences that governments were conscious
of the need to measure their effectiveness, and often successful in ameliorating
public problems.
A results orientation was expected to enhance governmental performance
in a variety of ways. Internally, better data about the performance of
programs would allow central agencies and political executives to make better
decisions about the allocation of scarce resources. Performance measures
could also be used as a new instrument for holding the managers of public
programs accountable, replacing input-based controls that were thought to
discourage efficiency and innovation within government. It was hoped that
public reporting of performance data would also change the behavior of
nongovernmental actors. Advocates of performance reporting hoped that
public debate would focus more on the effectiveness of programs as instruments
for achieving substantive policy goals, rather than administrative
processes used within those programs. Advocates also believed that citizens
would be impressed by the extent to which many government programs had
succeeded in remedying important social ills.