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Documents
Users' Guide For Measuring Public Administration Performance
June 2009
Kevin Brown and Sarah Repucci
United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)
 

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Introduction
The origins, purpose and structure of this guide

This Guide is intended to respond to an increasing demand from UNDP Country Offices and a wide range of national stakeholders for guidance on the multiplicity of tools and methods that are being used to measure, assess and monitor the performance of public administration (PAP)1. There is also a growing demand for more operational and nationally-owned measurement tools for public administration (PA), which is partly a reaction to traditional public administration reforms (PAR) and assessments that were mainly donor-driven.

In this Guide, those tools which produce information and ratings for countries are called "information sources" and those which users can apply themselves are referred to as "assessment tools."2

The proliferation of different assessment tools has resulted in some confusion about which tools to use, how they should be applied and their weaknesses and strengths. It is our hope that this Guide will help clear up some of this confusion by providing practical guidance to those who are seeking out better ways to measure PA at the country level, including government officials, donor agency staff, reform practitioners, civil society, and researchers. More specifically, readers will find answers to such questions as:
  • How to select amongst the existing (or decide to design a new set of ) PA indicators?
  • How to deal with the preparation and launching of an assessment?
  • How to secure national ownership of an assessment process in order to ensure that results are both useful and used by national actors?
  • How to ensure that the assessment is rigorous and methodologically sound?
  • What to do with the results?
  • How to address problems of sustainability
The Guide is essentially made up of two parts. The first part critically reviews the existing assessment tools and information sources which are readily accessible to potential users on the internet. It then sets out some practical guidance for users, partly in the form of short stories which illustrate some common measurement problems users may face and how they can be solved. The guidance is based on direct feedback from users of assessment tools, and from a distillation of good practices. To this end, 20 telephone interviews were conducted with PA practitioners (mainly intergovernmental agency staff, consultants and researchers) who have been directly involved in public administration reforms at the country level.

The second part is the Source Guide, which is an inventory of extant assessment tools and methodologies. At present, there is no resource that offers a global overview bringing together all extant approaches, tools and methods in the area of PA. The Source Guide is structured in a way to provide detailed information on each tool including: history, objectives, measurement focus, types of information generated, methodology used, strengths and weaknesses (including gender and poverty focus), and website from which a user can access the tool. The purpose of compiling and organising this information is to provide stakeholders engaged in public administration with a resource that can be drawn on for developing new assessment tools or adapting existing assessment approaches to their specific contexts. It is important to note that the Guide does not provide a new measurement or assessment methodology nor does it provide a specific blueprint to conduct such assessments.

The Guide is an important component of UNDP’s body of guidance on measuring and assessing democratic governance, developed as part of UNDP’s Global Programme on Capacity Development for Democratic Governance Assessments and Measurement.3 This Programme supports nationally owned processes for assessing and measuring democratic governance and aims to facilitate the development of tools which have broad-based national ownership, are pro-poor and gendersensitive, and are designed to identify governance weaknesses and capacity gaps.

  1. This Guide offers measurement guidance related to the performance of the Public Administration (PAP). It will refer to Public Administration (PA) in general (with the understanding that the focus is on public administration performance) and to Public Administration Reform (PAR) when it explicitly deals with issues of reform.
  2. This distinction is based on current practice, although in principle information sources could be used to enable national stakeholders to conduct their own assessments.
  3. http://www.undp.org/oslocentre/flagship/democratic_governance_assessments.html


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