ASPA Center for Accountability & Performance

WEBINAR: Implications of the President’s Management Agenda for States and Localities (Tues., June 9, 1 p.m. Eastern)

Center for Accountability & Performance

Attendee takeaways will begin with an overview of the President’s Management Agenda, its impact on grants and funding flows to states and localities and what the shifts in accountability for performance will have on their priority-setting and operations. Jed Herrmann, a former US Treasury and OMB official familiar with federal-state-local interactions, will be the discussant.

Resource of the Week:  Investing for Impact: A Decision-Making Tool

Annie E. Casey Foundation

Impact investing requires balancing financial returns with meaningful outcomes for children, families and communities. This report introduces a decision-making tool to help funders assess and compare investment opportunities with clarity and consistency.

Evidence and Policymaking: An Organizational Approach

Public Administration Review (Johan Christensen)

Evidence-informed policy-making not only depends on the rigor and relevance of the research, science communication or features of policy-makers. It also depends on how expertise arrangements in public organizations are organized.

From Receipts to Results: Denver Redesigns Homeless Shelter Contracts

Substack/Department of What Works

By tying payments to performance, the city is reducing administrative burden, improving data and helping shelter providers focus on moving people toward housing.

UK Introduces Pay for Performance for Top Civil Servants

Prime Minister’s Cabinet Office

For the first time ever, the UK Government has introduced performance-based pay progression for the Senior Civil Servants – with those who deliver for the public at an exceptional level being rewarded with salary increases. “Reward the doers, not the talkers.”

Seeking Legitimacy Through Accountability

Public Administration Review

Institution-based accountability, rooted in rational-legal authority and procedural regularity, is widely seen as the gold standard for ensuring legitimacy. However, this research experiment challenges the dominant view that emphasizes rational-legal authority as the main source of legitimacy among Chinese civil servants.

How San Diego Links Spending to Results

Substack/Department of What Works

An independent evaluation office is connecting rigorous evaluation to the policy and budget decisions that shape the lives of 3.3 million San Diegans.

Evidence for the Future?

Policy and Society Journal

Can strategic foresight become a source of evidence for policymaking? The authors develop a conceptual framework that “can meaningfully complement other forms of evidence within a broader, pluralistic knowledge ecosystem.”

50 Years of Evaluation: Imagining a Framework for Usability

New Directions for Evaluation Journal (Nick Hart)

National evaluation policy in the United States has substantially improved over the past half century, yet honest assessment requires acknowledging where fundamental challenges persist. The article proposes five adjustments for a future evaluation policy framework oriented toward better, faster, cheaper, and more usable evaluation.

Resource of the Week: Strategic Spartanburg Dashboard

City of Spartanburg, SC

Strategic Spartanburg is a non-profit research organization that leverages data and evidence to improve the quality of life in Spartanburg County by conducting research that informs policy and practice. Its website includes an Upward Mobility dashboard and a Community Indicators Project Data dashboard, along with a series of policy briefs.

Performance-Built Budgets

Barrett & Greene

This article summarizes a webinar focusing on the use of performance measures in the budgeting process.  It highlights the successes of the highly transparent results-oriented funding approach that is transforming the Ohio budgeting process, with examples of concrete program outcomes.

Closing the Loops

Federation of American Scientists (Amanda Girard)

Information and artifacts alone don’t necessarily facilitate learning and adaptation; strengthening federal feedback loops requires embedding translation and use into decision-making from the start. Here are six recommendations for how to do this.

Connecting Congress to Implementers

NextGov

Typically, Congress’ current mechanisms for performance feedback from those closest to implementation in the government are limited. The POPVOX Foundation, a nonpartisan nonprofit, based on the input of 50 federal employees pushed out of their government jobs last year, wants to change that.

WEBINAR: From Line Items to Impact: Incorporating Evidence into Budgeting (Tues., June 2, 3 p.m. Eastern)

Evidence Matters/University of Notre Dame

You’ll hear practical advice from local government leaders in San Diego County and the District of Columbia about how to get started and how to sustain momentum over time—building the internal capacity, cross-departmental partnerships, and political will needed to make evidence-informed budgeting a lasting part of how your government works.

Understanding Performance Management from the Bottom-Up

Public Administration Review (Leif Kongsgaard; Open Access PDF)

This article provides a cutting-edge perspective of how frontline employees and managers respond to a robust performance management system in terms of their reactions to “numbers” from the point of view of their emotions, attitudes, and actions. The research is based on rich empirical data and interviews with employees in the Danish public employment services.

Making Oversight Work

Niskanen Center (Anna Heetderks)

It’s just not all about cost savings. One of the areas in which oversight entities are well-positioned to influence agencies for the better is in their ability to provide candid, evidence-based assessments of how well agency programs are working. Oversight can essentially function as an impact evaluation team, communicating what’s working in a program and what isn’t. Realizing this potential requires changes in oversight practices in six areas.

Measuring the Hidden Workforce

Barrett & Greene 

While many government entities have performance management systems in place to measure the success or failure of the work that’s done in house, this can be trickier when it comes to the contractors and consultants who are sometimes referred to as the “hidden workforce.”

Closing the Loop

Federation of American Scientists Amanda Girard)

The federal government has a feedback-loop problem. Information and artifacts alone don’t necessarily facilitate learning and adaptation; strengthening federal feedback loops requires embedding translation and use into decision-making from the start.