Multifaceted social problems such as safety, social inclusion, poverty, mobility, rural development, city regeneration, or labour market integration require integrated approaches to steering. NPM-related fragmentation of policy and fragmentation of implementation lead to unsatisfactory public...

New Public Management has been around for a quarter of a century in European public sectors, yet despite the movement’s emphasis on indicators and evidence, there have been surprisingly few encompassing evaluations. In this paper, we provide an overview of academic evaluation and impact...

In this chapter, we challenge the assumption of a direct relationship between the existence and availability of information, and its use in decisions. We will do so by integrating three different sets of literature. Other chapters in this book stress organisations’ capacities and capabilities...

Measuring and comparing the overall performance of countries' public sectors requires agreement on definitions and objectives of government. I argue that such an agreement is about finding a consensus rather about finding better definitions. Measuring government requires a number of leaps of...

Competing values complicate debates on the reform of public services. Attention for competition and efficiency is balanced by concerns for equity and universality in service delivery. These potential value conflicts are best visible in the reform of services of general interest. Despite debates...

Purpose of this paper: A number of studies and indicators have ranked European countries in terms of the performance of their public sectors. This paper demonstrates there are important conceptual problems with such rankings and comparisons.Design/methodology/approach: Using the existing...