Outcome‐focussed planning in Australian local government: How council plans and cultural development plans measure up

Abstract

Contemporary public policy increasingly emphasises a focus on outcomes, the difference that occurs in the lives of citizens from policy and activity of government. Other contemporary imperatives for effective planning include: recognition of the values of the community whom plans serve, direction towards goals and objectives, utilisation of evidence, articulation of theories of change that underpin planning and responsiveness to evaluation. This article reports a desk‐based research project to assess how local government planning documents meet these imperatives. Two documents are examined for 67 councils across Australia: the major strategic document, council plan or other‐named document and the cultural development plan (CDP) or other‐named document that directs staff and investment aimed at cultural enrichment of the LGA. Findings indicate that the majority of councils’ documents appeared only concordant with one or two of these planning imperatives. No plan addressed more than three. Overall, council plans and cultural development plans did not clearly indicate their responsiveness to values of their communities, nor include objectives that formed measurable steps towards goals or formally refer to the use of evidence in decision‐making. No plans included theories of change to underpin decision‐making. This analysis indicates clear areas of improvement for planning for local governance.

Who is calling the shot? Risk culture experiments on bi-level governments

“…Current development in risk management (RM) application in the governmental sector tends to lean toward a specific field, such as government financing, disaster management, debt and audit (Al-Shbail, 2020; Birkmann et al , 2020; Consiglio and Zenios, 2015; Dobre et al , 2015); in all cases, RM benefits the government. However, current research trends seldom research RM relations with the general policy-making and budgeting of a government, even though research shows that government budgeting, expenditure and planning will affect society’s growth and its capability to achieve the maximum beneficial outcome (Ghourchian and Yilmazkuday, 2020; Uppal and Dunphy, 2019). Without strong policy-making capability and budgeting strength, a country lost its effectiveness and can risk impoverishing its people.…”

Exploring the impact of an economic‐centric approach to evaluating cultural activities: Evidence from a regional music festival

“…These reforms, collectively known as New Public Management (NPM), have sought to modernise the public sector through the introduction of private sector policies and practices, including increasingly challenging performance targets, widespread cost containment strategies, and closely monitored quality control processes (e.g. Belfiore, 2004;Uppal & Dunphy, 2019). More recently, the creative industries and community-based cultural activities have been influenced by NPM practices resulting in increased pressure on these organisations to find new ways of assessing value in order to justify government investment (Phiddian et al, 2017).…”