ASPA Center for Accountability & Performance

The Futures Mandate: How to Embed Foresight in Governance

Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies

This brief provides a good overview of international trends in addressing the challenge of planning for the long term, starting with the 2024 UN Summit of the Future and examples of what different countries around the globe are doing  to “put the future to work.”

Link Between Human Capital and Government Performance: 15 Questions

Public Performance & Management Review (Mary Guy)

When it comes to public performance, the importance of human capital cannot be overstated. Without human capital, no amount of financial capital can maintain a democracy and execute the public will. While there are many more questions that could be enumerated, the fifteen provided here serve to get the process started. 

Beyond the Data

Barrett & Greene

A wish: “After the heavy number crunching is done, we’d like academics to have a handful of discussions with experts in the field to see how they would interpret the information they’ve gathered.”

Resource of the Week:  ArundelStat, Bi-Annual Report 2026

Anne Arundel County, MD

This publication covers initiatives undertaken within Anne Arundel County government by the county’s ArundelStat Team. Initiatives cover projects, department-by-department performance, and the county’s commitment to OpenData. These include a Community Wellbeing Index and a “Hate Bias Incident Dashboard.” It also provides links to the ArundelStat website and community engagement newsletter.

Performance Management Checklist

Barrett & Greene

Here’s a handy checklist of a dozen proven pieces of advice to improve your organization’s performance management system!

How You Count Matters!

Bloomberg News

Traffic death statistics in the US may be misleading. By emphasizing the number of people killed per mile rather than deaths per capita, traffic safety groups risk normalizing the factors that make American roads so deadly. 

Improving Federal Information Transparency

U.S. Government Accountability Office

Recent GAO testimony summarizes its work in four areas where improving information transparency in federal spending and programs. These include: federal spending, improper payments, program inventory, and FOIA request processing. 

Resource of the Week: Resources to Increase Your Impact

Performance.gov

The homepage for the federal government’s main performance website is fairly vacuous, but buried beneath it is a useful gold mine of references and playbooks to help improve agency and program performance.

2026 CAP Recognition Awards

Harry Hatry Distinguished Performance Management Practice Award – David Bernstein

Joseph Wholey Distinguished Scholarship Award – Ting Huang

Organizational Leadership Award – County Auditor’s Office, Multnomah County, Oregon

Emerging Leaders Award – Courtney Hall, Kylie Jackson, and Howard Waldie, IV

Easy Measures

Barrett & Greene

States and localities often measure their success, but too often they focus on data that’s easier to collect but may be less helpful in achieving a desired result.

OMB Backpedals on Risk Management

Federal News Network

The Office of Management and Budget released a revised Circular A-123 that de-emphasizes enterprise risk management, which had been added to this guidance to agencies on internal controls ten years ago. ERM is no longer the organizing principle and returns A-123 to a compliance orientation. Here’s a link to the final guidance; the article in FNN is a year old when the draft guidance was being circulated. Haven’t seen any more recent articles.

Accountability in Public Administration: From Concepts to Empirical Tests

Handbook of Accountability Research (2026)

Public accountability is a crucial element of democratic governance relating those with power to the democratic audiences for whom they govern. . . In recent years, accountability has become a major topic in public administration research for at least three major reasons.

Advancing Accountability in Unsettled Times

Public Performance & Management Review

A symposium at ASPA’s 2024 conference in Minneapolis, brought together more than 30 scholars from across the globe— resulting in a special issue of PPMR. On the surface, much appears unchanged. Yet, a closer look reveals that the intervening years have brought significant shifts—both in how accountability is studied within the discipline and in the real-world contexts of politics and public administration.

Making Metrics Matter for Local Governments

PATimes (Alex Tremblay)

Great mini-case study of Hennepin County, MN’s efforts to improve performance, noting: “performance improves not through targets and goals but through participation in a continuous quality improvement process at all levels of the organization.”

Resource of the Week: City Health Dashboard

NYU Grossman School of Medicine

The goal is to provide communities and city leaders with an array of regularly updated data specific to neighborhood and/or city boundaries – such as life expectancy, park access, and children in poverty – to improve the health and well-being of everyone in the community.

Performance Comparisons Between Single vs. Collaborative Government Services

Urban Affairs Review (gated article)

This study examines whether general-purpose governments vs. their collaborative partnerships with subgovernment units deliver crime control more effectively. The authors found find that municipalities with Crime Control and Prevention Districts (CCPDs) experience greater reductions in violent crime than comparable municipalities without CCPDs, although the effects diminish over time.

A Performance Management Reckoning: Why Traditional Metrics Are Failing

PATimes (Bill Brantley)

Government performance management often tracks what is easiest to measure instead of what matters most. Research in Public Performance & Management Review shows that this output-focused approach can create incentives to chase targets rather than fulfill an agency’s mission, leading to so-called performance paradoxes, where meeting metrics does not improve public value.

Making Measurement About Leaders’ Priorities, Not About Measures

Stacey Barr’s Blog

Possibly the greatest obstacle to organisations having meaningful performance measurement is the leadership team’s attitudes toward it. . . We need to stop making it about performance measurement.

Resource of the Week:  Journal of Policy Implementation and Evaluation

The Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

While APPAM’s flagship Journal of Policy Analysis & Management (JPAM) remains the premier outlet for comprehensive and fully developed scholarly contributions, there is clear value in this new, complementary journal that features shorter, peer-reviewed articles with a targeted scope and a direct emphasis on policy design, implementation, and evaluation.