Politics, Administration and Performance: A continuing search, but no one best way?

Introduction: I have been tasked with the following question: how do relations between politics and administration shift when performance-improving reforms are introduced? As always, there is more than one way of interpreting the question, and of trying to answer. There are also strong normative aspects – for example, who should lead performance reforms, politicians or administrators? I will address this complexity by offering a number of different perspectives on performance management, and by making copius references to relevant work by scholars in many countries. Thus, for example, I will look at what we know of past performance-oriented reforms; at why a particular reform may work well in one context but not in another; at how relations between politicians and administrators have been shifting over the past few decades, and at what impacts current conditions of austerity may be having on these key relationships. Throughout I will also be emphasizing a paradox – that we have a huge literature on these issues, and yet this mountain of words leaves us without any clear or sure general answer. I attempt to show why generalisations are so difficult, and what kind of answers we may be able to develope once we abandon the perenially seductive idea that there is, if only we can find it, ’one best way’.