Paradoxes of improving performance management (systems) in public administration

New public management set off a new wave of performance management efforts in government. Recent performance literature has documented the shortcomings of performance management and provided recommendations on how to improve it. This emerging issues’ contribution revisits this literature and makes a distinction between recommendations for better implementation of what are seen as essentially good systems (single loop learning) on the one hand, and recommendations that target the performance management systems themselves (double loop learning) on the other. It is argued that in complex settings, performance management may benefit from new ways of carrying out performance management. It is suggested that performance management needs to be more agile, more decentralised and more political.

EIPASCOPE: Archive http://www.eipa.eu/en/eipascope/archive/

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