Using Unintended Consequences to Produce Intended Results: The Governance of Education in Sweden 1991-2020

Abstract

This paper explores the linkages between institutional reform and performance management, and presents a previously unexplored new purpose of performance management. It argues that institutional reform relocating formal authority across institutional levels provides a context where indirect or unintended consequences of performance management can help compensate for a loss of formal authority. By using measurements of performance, central institutions could maintain some degree of control over areas where decentralization has deprived them of formal authority. The paper focuses the governance of education in Sweden where New Public Management and decentralization were concurrent reform campaigns in the 1990s. It analyzes Swedish central government’s use of performance management tools 1991-2020 based on a mapping of educational sector reform, regulations and policy documents, interviews with senior political and administrative officials, and performance statistics. The paper shows that the Swedish central government in the wake of an extensive decentralization reform turned to performance measurement as an instrument to control local authorities’ and schools’ delivery of public education. It increased the performance measurement of executive agencies and programs, developed instruments to measure the performances of local governments and schools, and tools to assess student results.