We employ data from an original survey of citizens in the UK, France, Germany, Denmark, and the Czech Republic to examine correlates of citizen co-production of public services in three key policy areas: public safety, the environment, and health. The correlates of co-production we consider include demographic factors (age, gender, education, and employment status), community characteristics (urban, non-urban), performance perceptions (how good a job government is doing), government outreach (providing information and seeking consultation), and self-efficacy (how much of a difference citizens believe they can make). We also report on results from a series of focus groups on the topic of co-production held in each country.Our results suggest that women and elderly citizens generally engage more often in co-production and that self-efficacy-the belief that citizens can make a difference-is an especially important determinant across sectors. Interestingly, good outcome performance (in the sense of a safe neighborhood, a clean environment, and good health) seems to discourage co-production somewhat. Thus citizens' co-production appears to depend in part on awareness of a shortfall in public performance on outcomes. Our results also provide some evidence that co-production is enhanced when governments provide information or engage citizens in consultation. The specific determinants vary, however, not only by sector but across national contexts.

Given the prevailing emphasis on agency performance, customer focus, stakeholder’s interests and other methods of assessment under new public administration and prevailing managerialism in many public sectors around the world, administrative practitioners have taken to benchmarking as an instrument for assessing organizational performance and for facilitating management transfer and learning from other benchmarked organizations. The introduction of benchmarking into the public sector is still in its early stages. Technical problems, scepticism about usefulness and the appropriateness of transferring putative private sector competencies into public administration and the resistance in accepting organizational change as a necessary consequence of benchmarking exercises in the public sector, prevent the widespread acceptance and use of benchmarking in public sectors, arguably “punch‐drunk” with systemic change. Nevertheless, there are some encouraging examples of benchmarking within the public sector. This paper critically analyzes these examples in order to establish the vulnerability points of such measurement instruments which, possibly, need more research in order to establish the specific learning dimensions to benchmarking and to illustrate the importance of such benchmarking and learning within the highly risky, information technology (IT)‐driven experiences of systems development and failure.

This article provides an overview for this special issue on the evaluation of the quality of public governance. It charts the move in the public sector during the 1990s from concern largely with excellence in service delivery to a concern for good governance. It examines what we mean by governance and ‘good governance’ and the dimensions of ‘good public governance’. It demonstrates that there is now widespread interest in measuring not only the quality of services but also improvements in quality of life and improvements in governance processes. It discusses how measures of good governance are being used in different contexts around the world. Finally, it considers how the measurement of good governance can be encouraged, e.g. through awards, inspections, setting funding conditions and empowering stakeholders to demand better evidence.

IntroductionThe past decade has seen a major set of initiatives throughout the world to reform and modernize local government. Although there are specific national patterns of local government reforms, there has been a strong international trend towards the improvement of local service delivery -both in terms of the performance standards set and the mechanisms for planning and implementing service improvements.One important instrument of local government reforms has been benchmarking. Compared to the realm of national public administration, benchmarking at the local level is methodologically relatively easy and not as politically contentious. Local services are usually benchmarked against some generic excellence model or compared to the service provision of similar local authorities.However, most of the benchmarking criteria, models and methods which are currently available and which are being used to assess local service delivery no longer suit the needs of localities. Good local management implies high performance not only in managing local services so that they satisfy customers and taxpayers but also in enabling local communities to solve their own problems and to create better futures for their stakeholders. The article suggests that local government reforms need to go beyond the improvement of local service delivery. Calling upon the international experience of innovation in local governance, the article distils a series of benchmarking criteria which might be applied to define and identify 'good local governance'.The article starts by giving an overview of the drivers for local government reforms in OECD countries since the 1980s. It then explores recent trends in local government and community reforms in the UK and Germany. In the following section, the authors analyse whether the current benchmarking methods and criteria set within conventional models of 'excellence' in local government still meet the current needs of local communities. We argue that the conventional

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