What is it about?
This paper explores how a dynamic performance management (DPM) approach can give policy makers a more integrated, time-related understanding of how to address wicked problems successfully. The paper highlights how an outcome-based approach to solving wicked policy problems has to balance three very contrasting objectives of stakeholders in the policy making process – improving service quality, improving quality of life outcomes and improving conformity to the principles of public governance. It then demonstrates that this balancing act can be achieved by the use of DPM. Finally, policy insights from this novel approach are illustrated through a case study of a highly successful intervention to help young people with multiple disadvantages in Surrey, UK. The implications of DPM are that policy development needs to accept the important roles of emergent strategy and learning mechanisms, rather than ‘blueprint’ strategic planning and control mechanisms.
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Why is it important?
The policy intervention system which is modelled in this paper contains feedback loops which have important implications for policy. It highlights how the dynamic effects of interventions can ripple through the whole policy system, demonstrating the need for joined-up policymaking and management. it shows that achievements in one period may be significantly affected by interventions in previous periods – consequently, over-hasty evaluation, or evaluation which only looks at narrow parts of the system, is likely to lead to misleading judgments. It shows the nature of the risks which necessarily arise from innovations such as co-production, and suggests ways in which resilience might be incorporated in the policy system, so that the different stakeholders can bounce back, once system failure occurs (as it is bound to happen in any innovative system).
Perspectives
The model needs to be further developed to take account of the ‘transaction costs’ of co-production (and, of course, of traditional service delivery mechanisms). These involve, for example, gaining the trust of the service users and communities, whose co-production the public sector wishes to engage. Again, there will be a need to ensure the employment and motivation of public services staff who understand and are committed to co-production – and similarly to change the values of other partners. Although it may well be perceived by many stakeholders that both transaction costs and risks would be higher under co- production, providing a barrier to its introduction, it is not clear that that this is so. Providing simulations with the model and recalibrating it through time, as experience builds up, may allow this perceived barrier to be addressed. As the time paths of these changes are currently little understood. DPM may be a key tool for unpicking the role of transaction costs in system change, an aspect of policy evaluation which has been seriously under-researched up to now.
Professor Tony Bovaird
University of Birmingham
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Applying a Dynamic Performance Management Framework to Wicked Issues: How Coproduction Helps to Transform Young People’s Services in Surrey County Council, UK, International Journal of Public Administration, February 2017, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/01900692.2017.1280822.
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