Independent commissions may have an easier time in making public
statements about priority areas than the central agencies within govern-
14 Alasdair Roberts
ments. This may be so for two reasons. First, unelected officials within central
agencies may not have the authority to make deeply political decisions
about which of the many indicators proposed by other departments and
agencies ought to be regarded as key measures. The inclination may be to
maintain an expansive list and allow political executives to make decisions
about key priorities. But political executives may also face few incentives to
produce a narrow list of indicators.A neat list of indicators may please a few
stakeholders whose interests have been attended to, but displease a larger
number of stakeholders whose interests appear to have been neglected.
There is precedent to suggest that this may be a serious problem. In
1974–75 the Canadian government undertook a planning exercise that was in
many respects comparable to the sort of effort required to produce a governmentwide
performance plan. Central agencies consulted with ministers and
departmental officials in an attempt to settle on priorities for the government
elected in 1974. A brief list of priorities was thought to be essential if senior
decision makers were to make effective use of newly introduced PPBS procedures.
There was strong ministerial and departmental pressure to expand the
list of priorities, and neither central agencies nor the Cabinet seemed able to
resist this pressure. The effort to articulate a few top priorities was eventually
abandoned (French 1984). Difficulties in reaching internal agreement about
top priorities may have been encountered during the development of the U.S.
government’s governmentwide performance plan. A recent U.S. General
Accounting Office (GAO) study notes that the process for developing the plan
had been “decentralized,”with the result that it lacked an “integrated, consistent”
perspective on government priorities (GAO 1998b, 2, 6).
One of the reasons that governments may prove reluctant to give attention
to a few key social indicators is the fear that in so doing they will have
made explicit the criteria by which their performance should be judged in the
future. The concern is a reasonable one: in fact, one of the primary purposes
of governmentwide performance plans is to promote accountability in this
way. But governments may have legitimate concerns that a range of considerations
beyond their control could influence those indicators.Actually stipulating
performance targets—that is, the desired value of a social indicator at
some point in the future—raises the political stakes even further.
This may explain why governments that have produced their own performance
plans—rather than having one produced for them by an independent
commission—have been reluctant to make commitments about progress
on social indicators except in rough terms. The performance plan for the U.S.
government, for example, includes many commitments to “strive toward,”
“promote,” or “help achieve” outcomes. It may be understandable for a
Issues Associated with the Implementation of Performance Monitoring 15
government to avoid specificity on performance targets, particularly when
success depends so heavily on the cooperation of state, local, or foreign
governments, private contractors, or a healthy economy.Nevertheless, there is
a marked difference in tone in plans produced by independent bodies, which
make much more specific commitments about progress on indicators—
including, for example, precise targets for per capita income and unemployment
in 2000 and 2010 (Oregon Progress Board 1998)