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The central theme of this book concerns the many dilemmas and paradoxes of performance-based budgeting. The modern concept of performance-based budgeting is by now at least 70 years old and this poses the question, whether the limited results achieved might provide an indication that it has reached a phase in its life-cycle that it has become time for its retirement. This book argues the opposite. This book contains case studies from many countries in the world—including most developed countries, but with a focus on countries in transitional, developmental conditions, where implementation failures often limit the success of realized reforms, and where the dilemmas surrounding performance-based budgeting might be extremely prominent. In-depth evaluation of real cases serves as an important learning tool both for the academic and professional field. Implementation mistakes can perhaps not be prevented, but as international experiences show, can be resolved—the book may help in this way.

Traditional budgeting shows where the money was spent, but it does not give any idea as to the results of this spending. Performance-based budgeting is expected to address this gap. However, positive expectations connected to it have not been fully met in practice because of the implementation problems indicated in this book. Many dilemmas and imperfections can and do emerge in the practice of performance-based budgeting and critics are right in saying that it has negative side effects. Stakeholders should be aware of the hurdles, but also do all they can to overcome those hurdles. Governments experimenting with performance-based budgeting that ignore the obstacles on the way cannot improve the system. When governments acknowledge the obstacles, dilemmas and paradoxes, that could be the starting point toward optimizing such systems.

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Contains fulltext : 149245.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access) The Slovak approach to decreasing healthcare costs is based on a changed interpretation of the concept of ‘a minimum network of providers’. This study describes the changes made in the healthcare system in Slovakia in order to keep it affordable. It shows how the initial interpretation of a minimum network as an assurance for general access to healthcare services slowly changed into a cutback making the minimum network an upper limit for healthcare. The study argues that the complexity of the network made for non-transparent policies, in which consultation was nearly absent and vertical power became dominant, despite the semi-independence of actors in the network. This observation runs counter to the network theory suggestion that in complex networks, with semi-independent actors, vertical power becomes useless. 17 p.

The goal of the final chapter was to summarize lessons about the worst and best practices, causes, and effects of (successful or unsuccessful) participatory budgeting, delivered by the country case studies included in this book. The information collected serves to check to what extent participatory budgeting as practiced in the countries involved presents a real attempt to change municipal budgets toward addressing the needs of marginalized groups and to improve decision-making based on local democracy and participation, or whether these processes as such are to be judged to be more important than any output and outcomes. All in all, the practices of PB as they evolved in European countries out of the innovative original as developed in Porto Alegre in the 1990s can be seen neither as a process of policy diffusion nor as a process of policy mimesis. The terminology of participatory budgeting remained, but the goals and tools to achieve the goals resulted only in marginal changes in the status quo in municipalities in European countries practicing participatory budgeting, instead of resulting in radical changes to increase spending in favor of marginalized groups. Participatory budgeting in selected European countries is far away from the level of “best practice” in which local democracy and participation are promoted. However, it is also not possible to conclude that all experiences are just “trivial pursuits”.

Participatory budgeting is an innovation, starting in Porte Alegre in Brazil as a result of efforts made by the Brazilian Workers’ Party at the end of the 1980s. In that city, later referring to itself as the ‘Capital of Participatory budgeting’, it was seen as the first step from representative democracy towards that of direct democracy, calling participatory budgeting a case of radically democratising democracy; a practice in which the until then marginalised people from poor neighbourhoods were allowed to deliberate with the municipality how to spend part of its budget. It proved to be a powerful instrument as was seen in the widespread diffusion of participatory budgeting and becoming sometimes a standard practice in cities all over the world. This introductory chapter introduces the concept of participatory budgeting and defines questions to be answered by country chapters with the aim to provide more insight on the significance of participatory budgeting processes, to give recommendations to improve them, and to add to the theoretical understanding of such democratic practices.

This chapter provides an overview of the development of Performance Budgeting in the Netherlands, both at the level of central government and at the level of municipalities. In central government, there has been a development toward Accountable Budgeting, addressing three ‘what’-questions: what does the minister want to achieve?, what will the minister do in order to achieve the goals?, and what does the civil service apparatus resorting under the responsibility of the minister cost? In municipalities, there was a development toward Direct Costing (no allocation of overhead cost to policy areas) and the mandatory publication of financial and policy indicators. In a general sense, the chapter discusses that the translation of programs, their activities and their resource consumption into numbers is connected to control from a distance, both in terms of space and time. Such translation is not a simple linear and straightforward process, and is inherently political. Numbers are thus mediators rather than representations; they are matters of concern rather than matters of fact. When used properly, they have the potential to build trust.