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Most Canadian federal government departments and agencies are required to conduct a 'neutral assessment' of their evaluation function every five years. Such assessments should focus on the capacity of the evaluation units to produce high-quality evaluation reports which serve the needs of organizational decision-makers. Our study sought to analyze neutral assessment reports produced over a ten-year period. Overall, our review suggests that the neutral assessments consistently conform with central-agency requirements as well as indicate evolving evaluation capacity and utilization. We provide recommendations for improving the function and its impact. La plupart des ministeres et organismes du gouvernement federal canadien sont tenus d'effectuer un << examen neutre >> de leur fonction d'evaluation tous les cinq ans. De tels examens devraient etre axes sur la capacite des directions d'evaluation a produire des rapports d'evaluation de haute qualite qui repondent aux besoins des decideurs organisationnels. Le but de notre etude etait d'analyser des rapports d'examens neutres effectues sur une duree de dix ans. Dans l'ensemble, notre analyse indique que les examens neutres sont invariablement conformes aux exigences des organismes centraux et indique aussi un progres au niveau de la capacite et de l'utilisation de l'evaluation. Nous proposons des recommandations pour ameliorer la fonction et ses resultats., Introduction In the Canadian federal government, the program evaluation function is responsible for the development and implementation of applied social research studies to assess the relevance, effectiveness and efficiency of [...]

: Objective: To conduct a real‐time audit to assess a Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) activity to improve the quality of public health data in the Sydney Local Health District (SLHD) Public Health Unit during the first wave of COVID‐19. Methods: A real‐time audit of the Notifiable Conditions Information Management System was conducted for positive cases of COVID‐19 and their close contacts from SLHD. After recording missing and inaccurate data, the audit team then corrected the data. Multivariable regression models were used to look for associations with workload and time. Results: A total of 293 cases were audited. Variables measuring completeness were associated with improvement over time (p Conclusion: Utilising a team, separate from operational staff, to conduct a real‐time audit of data quality is an efficient and effective way of improving epidemiological data. Implications for public health: Implementation of CQI in a public health unit can improve data quality during times of stress. Auditing teams can also act as an intervention in their own right to achieve high‐quality data at minimal cost. Together, this can result in timely and high‐quality public health data., SARS‐COV‐2, the virus that causes COVID‐19, was first reported in December 2019 in China.[sup.1,2] It has since spread around the world, with the first case reported in Australia on 25 [...]

This article reviews recent efforts by the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation (MRI) to measure and evaluate the success of its policies. It argues that these efforts have been inhibited by changes in the ministry's political context and the inherent complexity of the issues that innovation policies seek to address. The innovation strategy pursued by the ministry incorporates an element of mediated causality in its program logic, which complicates efforts to determine policy outcomes. When compounded by a changing normative context for judging success, this inherent complexity makes it very difficult to accurately determine and learn from the MRI's policy outcomes. The article concludes by suggesting a preliminary process of inquiry that might address some of these difficulties. Cet article examine les initiatives prises recemment par le ministere de la Recherche et de l'Innovation de l'Ontario (MRI) pour mesurer et evaluer le succes de ses politiques. Il soutient que ces efforts ont ete entraves a la fois par les changements dans le contexte politique du ministere et par la complexite inherente des questions que les politiques d'innovation tentent de resoudre. La strategie d'innovation suivie par le ministere comporte dans la logique de son programme un element de causalite assistee qui complique les efforts deployes pour determiner les resultats en matiere de politique. Quand un contexte normatif changeant pour evaluer la reussite vient s'ajouter a cette complexite inherente, il devient extremement difficile de determiner avec exactitude les effets de la politique du MRI et donc d'en tirer par la suite des enseignements. L'article se termine en suggerant un processus d'enquete preliminaire qui pourrait regler certaines de ces difficultes., Introduction Policy evaluation is fundamentally both a normative and technical exercise, in that it involves making judgements about whether what is happening is what should be happening; doing policy evaluation [...]

Introduction Compared with White Americans, African Americans exhibit lower levels of trust in government. However, there is a dearth of research that seeks to explain that group's level of political [...]

Thank you, Bill Chameides. I will tell you how I'm going to spend my birthday: I'm going to testify in the morning before Senator Bingaman and the Senate Committee on [...]

Public agencies are increasingly viewed as performing their functions in partnership with other public, nonprofit, and private sector actors, with many public services the joint products of collaborations of governmental [...]

Introduction For those following politics in Quebec, the 2007-2008 period was an opportune time to conduct research on the dynamics of race and national identity. This paper follows a path [...]

Evaluating public agency performance has typically been based on objective measurements. However, some researchers contend that evaluation is not complete without considering client perceptions of agency performance. This study supports combining subjective client perceptions with objective data in the evaluation process. Survey results and internal performance data are examined for a state agency charged with investigating citizen disputes with utility companies. Regression analyses show that the factors that most influence the client's satisfaction with agency performance are the client's perception of how long it took to resolve the dispute, based on survey results, and whether the case was decided in the client's favor, from the agency's internal records. The 'real' resolution time recorded in the agency's information system was not significant. These results indicate that subjective data provide valuable information for evaluating agency performance.

Few studies have empirically assessed the factors that affect government agencies' public responsiveness from a public management perspective. This article tests a preliminary model that explains the level of public responsiveness with variables about external political environments and internal organizational characteristics. The hypotheses are tested with survey data from state health and human service agencies. The results show that the support of elected officials, the influence of the public and media, and decentralization of decision making have a positive impact on public responsiveness. Results-based management changes have a quadratic [intersection]-shaped relation with public responsiveness. Further, the influence of client groups has a negative impact on public responsiveness. KEYWORDS: government organizations, organizational structure, public responsiveness, results-based management

The article examines reactivity, the idea that people change their behavior in reaction to being observed, evaluated or measured. It indicates that these public measures change expectations and institutions.

Presidents seem to scorn the 'neutral competence' political scientists insist they need. Franklin Roosevelt (1933-45), however, evidently embraced this administrative approach--even at a time when the demands for presidential leadership were arguably greater than those experienced by any of his successors. Roosevelt thus offers an important historical test case for both critics and advocates of neutral competence. Focusing specifically on the Bureau of the Budget (BoB), we ask what historical circumstances dictated FDR's use of this agency; how, if at all, that use comported with the more abstract notions of a neutrally competent presidential staff; and what lessons, if any, result for modern presidents. We argue that the BoB under FDR epitomized neutral competence, but that this orientation responded to his political needs. More generally, we conclude that what constitutes responsiveness varies greatly depending on a president's political context. [T]he gulf between the textbook approach to staffing the presidency and the approach adopted by most postwar presidents is so great that one may be tempted to ask whether the institutional presidency, originally advocated by Brownlow fifty years ago, has not just been a figment of the imagination of political scientists and public administrators. --John Hart, 'The Presidential Branch' (1995, 216)

Following its early successes, NASA has taken a number of mis-steps, resulting in a loss of focus at the agency. Over-reliance on the Space Shuttle, treating it as an operational rather than an experimental vehicle, and the massive-cost-for-limited-results debacle of the ISS are chief among them, while the new and expensive Project Constellation targetting the Moon and Mars also promises little return. NASA needs to revitalize itself by pursuing missions more relevant to ordinary people--solar energy generation, planetary protection and sustainability, development of a robotically assembled Moon colony, among others--by restructuring itself and by working much more closely with industry and private entrepreneurs.

We study how satisfaction with service delivery affects trust in public agencies in an empirical setting. Our basic assumption is that the causal relation between satisfaction and trust cannot be fruitfully analyzed unless the measures are controlled for a common component, which we identify, as the predisposition toward government. The empirical results suggest that the impact of a negative experience with a public agency is much more pronounced than the effect of a positive one. Decreasing the number of disappointed clients will, therefore, have a stronger effect on increasing trust in the public sector than increasing the number of (already) well-pleased clients: Trust comes on foot and goes away on horseback. KEYWORDS: client satisfaction, performance, public services, service delivery, trust in government

If academic research on performance measurement is to benefit the wider global community, an examination of its implementation under various contexts is vital. This paper, which focuses on the performance measurement systems of Australian and Hong Kong government departments, aims to just do this. Although both countries adopt an outputs-and-outcomes performance measurement framework, Australia's devolved approach to performance measurement contrasts that that of Hong Kong's centralized approach. This paper evaluates their performance measurement systems against five commonly recommended criteria for performance measures: validity, legitimacy, credibility, public accessibility, and functionality. Several criteria were found to interact with one another, suggesting that one cannot always get away with focusing on some of the features in a performance measurement system at the expense of other features. The similarities and differences found in the performance measurement systems between both countries are also discussed. KEYWORDS: Australia, Hong Kong, performance measurement

Competency, a long-standing concern with the skills and capabilities of bureaucrats and bureaucracies, has recently attracted renewed attention for public service reformers and consultants. This study explores three questions about the recent fashion for competency language in public management. First, it considers whether contemporary approaches to competency have been diffused from a single source by briefly examining the history of the competency movement in three countries. Second, it analyses, on the basis of case studies drawn from the UK Department of Trade and Industry and the German Federal Economics ministry, how government departments organise competency by assembling policy teams that reflect the problem constellations for particular policy issues. Finally, it raises the issue of whether national administrations have adopted appropriate responses to competency in the light of contemporary demands placed in national bureaucracies. It concludes that there is only a limited tendency to diffusion, that departments respond to problems more by inertia than design and that the national responses offer only limited solutions to justified concerns about competency., Competency--avant la lettre, perhaps--has long been at the heart of debates about administration and bureaucracy, denoting the skills and capabilities that the state machine does or should possess, as well [...]

Byline: Alberto Alesina (1), Arnaud Devleeschauwer (1), William Easterly (2), Sergio Kurlat (3), Romain Wacziarg (4) Keywords: ethnic heterogeneity; growth; government quality Abstract: We provide new measures of ethnic, linguistic, and religious fractionalization for about 190 countries. These measures are more comprehensive than those previously used in the economics literature and we compare our new variables with those previously used. We also revisit the question of the effects of ethnic, linguistic, and religious heterogeneity on the quality of institutions and growth. We partly confirm and partly modify previous results. The patterns of cross-correlations between potential explanatory variables and their different degree of endogeneity makes it hard to make unqualified statements about competing explanations for economic growth and the quality of government. Our new data, which features the underlying group structure of ethnicities, religions and languages, also allows the computation of alternative measures of heterogeneity, and we turn to measures of polarization as an alternative to the commonly used index of fractionalization. Author Affiliation: (1) Department of Economics, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 02138, USA (2) New York University and Center for Global Development, 269 Mercer Street, New York, NY, 10003, USA (3) The World Bank, 1818 H Street, N.W., Washington, DC, 20433, USA (4) Stanford Graduate School of Business, 518 Memorial Way, Stanford, CA, 94305, USA Article History: Registration Date: 06/10/2004

WARD N., LOWE P. and BRIDGES T. (2003) Rural and regional development: the role of the Regional Development Agencies in England, Reg. Studies 37, 201-214. The Regional Development Agencies (RDAs) were established in 1999 to promote economic development in the English regions and inherited staff and programmes from the former Rural Development Commission. The paper analyses the evolving role of the RDAs in rural development. It argues that the changing treatment of rural issues in regional development reflects a shift from a national to more regionalized and differentiated conceptions of rurality, and suggests that the 2001 foot and mouth crisis prompted a rethink of the 'rural' in the 'regional' among RDAs. The paper concludes by reflecting on the future evolution of the RDAs' rural development work. Rural development, Regional development, Regional Development Agencies WARD N., LOWE P. und BRIDGES T. (2003) L'amenagement du territoire et l'action rurale: le role des agences de developpement regional en Angleterre, Reg. Studies 37, 201-214. Les agences de developpement regional (Regional Development Agencies; RDA) ont ete etablies en 1999 afin de promouvoir le developpement economique des regions d'Angleterre, et ont herite le personnel et les programmes de l'ancienne commission chargee de l'action rurale (Rural Development Commission). L'article cherche analyser l'evolution du role des RDA dans l'action rurale. On affirme que la facon dont l'amenagement du territoire aborde les questions rurales reflete un glissement d'une notion nationale du rural vers une norion plutot regionale et distincte, et laisse supposer que la crise de la fievre aphteuse de l'an 2001 a incite les RDA a remettre en question la notion du 'rural' dans le 'regional'. Pour conclure, l'article considere l'evolution future de l'action rurale des RDA. Action rurale Amenagement du territoire, Agences de developpement regional WARD N., LOWE P. und B RIDGES T. (2003) Landliche und regionale Entwicklung: Die Rolle der regionalen Entwiclungstager, Reg. Studies 37, 201-214. Regionale Entwicklungstrager (Regional Development Agencies = RD As) wurden in den englischen Regionen im Jahre 1999 zum Zwecke der Forderung wirtschaftlicher Entwicklung eingeserzt; Prograrmm und Personal ubernahmen sie dabei von der ehemaligen landlichen Entwicklungskommissson (Rural Development Commission). Dieser Aufsatz analysiert die sich herausbildende Rolle der RDAs bei der landlichen Entwicklung. Es wird die These aufgestelltr, da[beta] die sich wandelnde Behandlung landlicher Fragen bei der Regionalent-wicklung eine Verschiebung von staatlicher auf starker regional bestimmtes und differenziertes Verstandnis der Landlichkeit darsteilt, und legt nahe, da[beta] die durch die Maulund Klauenseuche im Jahre 2001 verursachte Krise die RDAs veranla[beta]t habe, die Rolle der landlichen Komponente im regionalen Zusammenhang neu zu uberdenken. Der Aufsatz schlie[bet a]t mit einer Betrachtung der zukunftigen Aufgaben der landlichen Entwicklungsarbeit der regionalen Entwicklungstrager. Landliche Entwicklung Regionale Entwicklung, Regionale Entwicklungstrager

The author evaluates the usefulness of national human rights institutions in protecting human rights.

Efforts to implement the Government Performance and Results Act have brought about comprehensive discussions between Congress and government agencies. Prior to the passage of this bill, the legislative and executive branches were virtually ignorant of the issues faced by the other branch. As legislators became responsible for reviewing the performance of administrative agencies, it became a necessity for them to be knowledgeable about the mission and procedures of these agencies. The dialogues between the two branches illuminated the areas that needs improvement., The Government Performance and Results Act has produced an added side benefit: Congress and the agencies are working more closely together. The relations between the legislative and executive branches have [...]