Recent reforms in public sector performance management in Asia: major limitations and implications

Abstract

In recent years, the principles of performance measurement in public administration have shifted in favour of empirical, quantifiable, and instrumental criteria, especially under the recent market-led public sector reforms presented as Reinvention, New Public Management (NPM), and Good Governance. While these trends in performance management emerged in the neo-managerial public sector context recently reinforced in most Western countries, they are hardly compatible with the administrative traditions rooted in Asia. Although most Asian countries have embraced the NPM model and adopted its performance management framework, their managerial practices have not been adequately reoriented towards the empiricist instrumental principles of performance. In these countries, actual performance assessment practices have hardly moved away from traditional performance benchmarks. These theory-practice gaps (between official prescriptions and actual practices) have certain undesirable implications for public management. These limits and implications are explored in this chapter based on experiences in selected Southeast Asian countries.