Designing Governance Structures for Performance and Accountability PDF Download

Author: Andrew Podger
Publisher: ANU Press
ISBN: 1760463604
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
Designing Governance Structures for Performance and Accountability discusses how formal and informal governance structures in Australia, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Taiwan may be designed to promote performance and to ensure accountability. The book presents a selection of papers developed from the Greater China Australia Dialogue on Public Administration’s seventh workshop held in June 2017 hosted by City University of Hong Kong. Insights are provided on both current developments in the different contexts of the three jurisdictions examined, and on broader institutional and organisational theories. Chapters cover theories of organisational forms and functions in public administration, the ‘core’ agency structures used in the different jurisdictions, the structures used to deliver public services (including non-government organisational arrangements) and other ‘non-core’ agency structures such as government business enterprises, regulatory organisations and ‘integrity’ organisations. A particular emphasis is placed on the institutional arrangements the executive arm of government uses for advising on and implementing government policies and programs. Although the book explores arrangements and developments within very different political governance systems, the purposes of the structures are similar: to promote performance and accountability. This book is a companion volume to Value for Money: Budget and Financial Management Reform in the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan and Australia (ANU Press, 2018).

Author: Christopher J. Koliba
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351565141
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 346

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Book Description
What do public administrators and policy analysts have in common? Their work is undertaken within networks formed when different organizations align to accomplish some kind of policy function. To be effective, they must find ways to navigate complexity and generate effective results. Governance Networks in Public Administration and Public Policy describes a variety of trends and movements that have contributed to the complexity of these systems and the challenges that must be faced as a result. Providing a theoretical and empirical foundation in governance networks, the book offers a conceptual framework for describing governance networks and provides a holistic way to conceive their construction. The text details the skills and functions of public administrators in the context of networked relationships and presents the theoretical foundations to analyze governance networks. It identifies the reforms and trends in governing that led to governance networks, explains the roles that various actors take on through networked relationships, highlights the challenges involved in the failure of networked activities, and illustrates how policy tools are mobilized by these relationships. Be a part of building governance networks 2.0! The author’s website contains support materials such as PowerPoint® presentations, writable case study templates, and other useful items related to building the field’s capacity to describe, evaluate, and design governance networks using the framework of this book. You can post case studies of governance networks, draw on other’s case study materials, and learn about research and educational opportunities. Based on research and real-life experience, the book highlights the interplay between public actors and policy tools. The authors demystify this complex topic of governance networks and explore the practical applications of the conceptual framework. Practical and accessible, the book presents concepts in such a way that readers can engage in these ideas, apply them, and deepen their understanding of the dynamics unfolding around them.

Author: Andrew Podger
Publisher: ANU Press
ISBN: 1760464376
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 438

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Book Description
This festschrift celebrates the extensive contribution John Wanna has made to the research and practice of politics, policy and public administration. It includes both personal acknowledgements of his work and substantial essays on the issues that he focused most closely upon during his academic career: budgeting and financial management, politics, and public policy and administration. The essays address contemporary developments in public sector financial management in Australia and overseas, changing political processes in Queensland and the Commonwealth, and public governance and administration reform trajectories in Australia and internationally, including in China. A common theme is the importance of linking research to practice, reflecting John Wanna’s own style and contribution. Essays include exploration of the interface between academia and practice, including from the perspective of practitioners. The authors of the essays in this volume include eminent Australian and international scholars of public administration, experienced public service practitioners and younger scholars influenced by John Wanna.

Author: Kathe Callahan
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 1420013424
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
Elements of Effective Governance: Measurement, Accountability and Participation is one of the first books to explore the relationship between accountability, government performance, and public participation. It discusses two main assumptions: greater accountability leads to better performance; and the more the public is involved in the measu

Author: Andrew Podger
Publisher: ANU Press
ISBN: 1760465747
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 612

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Book Description
This book draws on more than a decade of workshops organised by the Greater China Australia Dialogue on Public Administration, involving scholars and practitioners from Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Australia. Although these workshops recognised the major differences in the institutional frameworks of these jurisdictions, until recently they focused largely on the shared challenges and the diffusion of ideas and approaches. As rising international tensions inevitably draw attention to areas where interests and philosophies diverge, it is the differences that must now be highlighted. Yet, despite the tensions, this book reveals that these jurisdictions continue to address shared challenges in public administration. The book’s contributors focus in detail on these four areas: 1. intergovernmental relations, including the shifting balance between centralisation and decentralisation 2. budgeting and financial management, including during and after the COVID-19 pandemic 3. the civil service, its capability, and its relationship with government and the public 4. service delivery, particularly in health and aged care. This book is aimed at a wide readership, not only at those within the jurisdictions it explores. It emphasises the importance of continued engagement in understanding different approaches to public administration—confirming fundamental philosophical differences where necessary but also looking for common ground and opportunities for shared learning.

Author: Frédéric Varone
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN: 1800884893
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 443

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Book Description
This comprehensive Handbook examines public policy evaluation in democracies. Focusing on the political dimension of the evaluation process, it argues that policy evaluation can be an emancipatory tool, reducing social inequalities and exclusion, and offers novel suggestions on how evaluations can be used to improve democratic policymaking.

Author: Chris Cornforth
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135022186
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
The current fashion for rolling back the state has seen the nonprofit or third sector playing an increasing role in what were previously the heartlands of the public sphere. The growing significance of the sector and its increasing reliance on public funds mean it has also attracted increased scrutiny. From outside the sector concerns have been raised about the accountability and performance of nonprofit organizations. From within the sector there has been considerable debate about whether the increased reliance on government contracts is in danger of undermining the sector’s independence. As a result the spotlight has fallen on governance arrangements and whether they are adequate to ensure that nonprofit organizations are effective and accountable for their actions, and able to retain their independence. This collection offers a comprehensive assessment of research on the governance of nonprofit organizations. Nonprofit governance research has been dominated by the study of boards of unitary organizations and has paid insufficient attention to the multi-level nature of governance, governance relationships and dynamics, and the contribution of actors other than board members, to governance processes. Drawing on the research of leading scholars in the US, UK, Canada and Australia, this book presents new perspectives on non-profit governance, which help to overcome these weaknesses. Written in an accessible manner the book will be of value to scholars, researchers, students, reflective practitioners and governance consultants and advisers.

Author: Peter Weill
Publisher: Harvard Business Press
ISBN: 1422163342
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Firms with superior IT governance have more than 25% higher profits than firms with poor governance given the same strategic objectives. These top performers have custom designed IT governance for their strategies. Just as corporate governance aims to ensure quality decisions about all corporate assets, IT governance links IT decisions with company objectives and monitors performance and accountability. Based on a study of 250 enterprises worldwide, IT Governance shows how to design and implement a system of decision rights that will transform IT from an expense to a profitable investment.

Author: Ralf Müller
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN: 1788110978
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
This concise text introduces an integrated view of all project management-related activities in an organization, called Organizational Project Management (OPM). Practical cases from several organizations, as well as popular theories such as the Resource-Based Theory and Institutional Theory provide for an insightful yet realistic understanding of OPM as an integrative tool for organizations to improve their efficiency and effectiveness.

Author: Jerry Louis Mashaw
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Accountability is a protean concept, a placeholder for multiple contemporary anxieties. Public concern about the unaccountability of bureaucrats, corporations, supranational institutions and privatized governmental services - to name but a few targets - is ubiquitous. Accountability is surely a problem. But exactly what sort of problem? And what accountability structures would suffice to assure the public that the behavior of a multitude of powerful actors is subject to effective oversight and control. This essay begins by unpacking accountability to demonstrate that accountability talk is at base talk about the answer to six linked questions whose answers form the basic building blocks of what I will refer to as accountability regimes. These questions take on multiple meanings in diverse contexts, but my claim is that they are a set of questions that must be addressed to make sense of any claim about the efficacy of accountability. I then present a partial taxonomy of accountability regimes. This taxonomic exercise provides a basic map of the choices available to institutional designers (or institutional critics) when addressing accountability questions. It also begins to illustrate why institutional design issues are at base a set of choices among competing, overlapping and inevitably unsatisfactory, accountability regimes. Part III, illustrates the way this conceptual framework of accountability, a sort of grammar of governance for addressing accountability issues, can be deployed in a contemporary arena of increasing importance and widespread dispute: contracted out governance. This section looks at the accountability concerns that contracting out generates and sets those anxieties within a framework of long-standing debates about the relative roles of government, the market, and civil society in pursuing collective projects. This sets the stage for an exercise in auditing the accountability books - a demonstration of how accountability issues might be analyzed systematically within the context of a specific, contracted out governmental system. This audit illustrates how the taxonomy helps reveal the complex of accountability issues that can arise in a highly contracted out system, along with some of the difficulties and unanticipated accountability consequences of particular design choices. Finally, the Conclusion addresses an issue that lurks beneath the surface of the whole discussion: How should we assess the acceptability of particular accountability arrangements? The point here is not to suggest that, if we get the normative stance, right we can always solve our accountability problems through clever institutional design. It illustrates instead that once we get the analytics or grammar of accountability reasonably straight, and understand the basic purposes of different forms of accountability, we can then see more clearly what many accountability disputes really entail. For, at base, much of the dispute about accountability is a dispute about what particular institutions are meant to do, not how accountable they are in the doing of it.