Global Perspectives on Results-Based Management

Results-based management was the theme of this session that featured a panel of international experts, including Ray Rist of the World Bank, Frederic Sautet of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, and Michael Garrett of the Regional Municipality of York, Canada.

Performance-based public management is about moving from a procedural focus to an emphasis on results. That means trading in the control and command system of government for government by contract.

These concepts present a number of challenges for governments around the world. Methodological challenges include:

- Internal pricing problems – what is the value of various outputs and outcomes?
- Data collection – the more you refine your outputs, the more problematic it becomes to obtain data (in particular, regular data flows).
- Indicator selection – be very careful with these. Changing indicators is a source of tremendous frustration among staff and program managers.
- Attribution and allocation of back-office costs – how does payroll relate to waste management in terms of outcomes and measurements?
- Capital – accounting for capital.
- Trusting data – In developing countries especially, there is often minimal trust in data, which makes performance indicators ineffective.

Results-based initiatives also involve political challenges, such as:
- Identifying the right outcomes – to a large context, this is a political question. Who should determine and prioritize outcomes, bureaucrats or elected officials? Both?
- Responsibility – establishing responsibility for outcomes, etc.
- Manage expectations – this is a long-term process and goals will not be met overnight.

Around the world, results-based initiatives are still in the early adoption stage. Developing countries are more in the infancy stages. Ray Rist did a rundown on world leaders in results-based evaluation. Here are some success stories:

Middle East: Jordan and Egypt.
Africa: Ghana, Tanzania, Uganda, Botswana, and South Africa.
South America: Chile (world-class).
East Asia: Korea (world-class). But India and China are also making competitive efforts.
Eastern Europe: Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovak Republic and Romania.
Central Asia – Kyrgyzstan, especially its health system.

In Rist’s view, the interesting action in result-based management is in the developing world, since the scale of everything is so much greater than in the developed world.