The philosophy of New Zealand’s Performance Improvement Framework: Introduction

1/2/2019

In 2013, New Zealand’s Parliament, with rare support from all political parties, amended its 1988 State Sector Act, which had created one of the world’s most devolved public administration systems.

After 25 years of increasing frustration among citizens and officials about insufficiently joined up the public sector, a conservative political executive elected in 2008, amidst the global financial crisis, was both anxious and doubtful about whether the Wellington-based and focused bureaucracies were willing to work together, let alone be transparent about agency and system performance.

After all, the 1988 Act, along with the Public Finance Act of 1989, had radically changed a traditional, unified public service bureaucracy into the civil service equivalent of Proctor and Gamble: a holding company made up of between twenty-eight and thirty-two policy organisations, steering over 3,500 public sector organisations in a decentralised corporate model, with the most senior officials on reviewable contracts, while also being accountable for delivering measurable ‘outputs’ for the political ‘owners’ of the public sector (Gill, Pride, Gilbert, Norman and Mladenovic, in Ryan and Gill, 2012).

With “powerful global forces” reshaping and “creating a world that was fast- paced, heterogeneous, complex and unpredictable”, with the internet ubiquitous, and citizen’s expectations rising, and networked communities challenging traditional norms about public management (Ryan, 2011), the central agencies (or corporate head-office) in the New Zealand public sector responded to the
challenge in three main ways.

The first response was the Better Public Services review. The review helped create the ten-cross agency and political ‘result areas’ (Morrison, 2014). The second response was a controversial cap on individuals working in the core public service. Controversial because the cap enabled the political executive to determine the administrative executive’s input controls, thus directing the capacity of what was assumed to be a constitutionally independent public service.

The third response was the Performance Improvement Framework or the ‘PIF’ (Te Kawa and Guerin, 2012; Ryan, 2012; Palmer, 2013; School of Government, Victoria University of Wellington, 2017).

The PIF was a locally designed analytical framework and a change management tool designed to reset and reconceptualise the performance of public institutions while making it clear what value the institution was supposed to provide the public (not just Ministers) in the medium-to-long term (SSC, 2013a).

The first and second responses relied heavily on managerial or technocratic techniques: for example, what-we-measure-is-what-matters, and an assumption that costs can be controlled by reducing the number of people employed to do the work (even though the work had not changed).

The PIF, on the other hand, developed a somewhat different approach – while still inestimably swimming against the waters of managerialism, the PIF developed its own epistemology, ontology, theoretical basis and methodology. These four elements make up the philosophy of the PIF – a deliberate attempt to
swim against the tide of agency theory and contractualism (Te Kawa and Guerin, 2012; SSC 2014a; School of Government, Victoria University of Wellington, 2017).

References

Gill, D., Pride, S., Gilbert, H., Norman, R. and Mladenovic, A., 2010. The future state project: meeting the challenges of the 21st century. Policy Quarterly, 6(3).

Morrison, A., 2014. Picking up the pace in public services. Policy Quarterly, 10(2).

Ryan, B. (2012, March). Thoughts after Future State. Paper presented to the Institute of Public Administration New Zealand, Wellington, New Zealand.

Palmer, G.W., Butler, A.S. and Roberts, S., 2018. Towards Democratic Renewal: Ideas for Constitutional Change in New Zealand. Victoria University Press.

School of Government, Victoria University of Wellington, 2017, Independent Review of the Performance Improvement Framework for the State Services Commission, Victoria University Press.

State Services Commission, 2013, Performance Improvement Framework: knowledge, methodology and method presentation to IPANZ by Deb Te Kawa and Debbie Francis, Wellington, New Zealand.

Te Kawa, D., & Guerin, K. (2012). Provoking debate and learning lessons: it is early days, but what does the Performance Improvement Framework challenge us to think about? Policy Quarterly, 8(4).