Faced with burgeoning infrastructure needs and circumscribed capital revenues, local governments must perforce set priorities among competing capital projects submitted by their operating agencies. This process involves value choices and political resolutions in addition to technical considerations. This article finds current priority‐setting procedures in need of improvement and suggests a framework for local government assessment and selection of capital investment projects.
Government agencies are encouraged to adopt business practices to improve program performance. But there are significant differences between the private and public sectors, both in the nature of the commodities offered and the way people in decision-making roles maximize utility. These differences are likely to affect the success of such endeavors. We examine efforts by the Office of National Drug Control Policy to develop a National Drug Control Strategy. A theoretical model of performance-based management is developed within this context that allows us to identify tensions that are inherent in any system of this kind. Some basic methods for reducing tension are then discussed. Given the generality of the model, it is possible the observations offered here are relevant to other policy problems requiring multi-agency coordination. total quality management (Swiss 1992). In the following sections, we subsume these approaches under the general rubric of performance-based management, and thus refer to all mechanisms that align an organization's operations with the attainment of some set of outcomes. It is fair to say that the passage of the Government Performance and Results Act of 1993 (GPRA) represented an effort to legislate conformity with the principles of performance-based management (Kimm 1995; Henderson 1995; Rosenbloom 1995 for initial reactions; Radin 1998 for prognostic comments).When an organization adopts performance-based management, it is assumed the behavior of individuals will change in response to a new definition of the situation. The structure provided by a novel set of rules changes the perceived utility of certain kinds of actions. An individual seeking to advance in the private sector soon finds that personal interests are well served by achieving corporate objectives. The GPRA and related efforts assume that a similar phenomenon occurs in the public sector. In its most Ronald Simeone is the president of Simeone Associates, Inc., a private consulting firm specializing in public policy research. He has authored a number of articles on drug and crime control policy, program evaluation, estimation, and computer simulation. He served at the policy level in the State of New York for 14 years and was one of the principal architects of the Performance Measures of Effectiveness PME system developed by the Office of National Drug Control Policy.
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