IPMN Newsletter 2001
Number 3

Call for Papers for the IPMN 2002 Siena Conference The topic theme of the 2002 International Public Management Network Conference is "The Impact of Managerial Reform on Informal Relationships in the Public Sector." 

As public sector management reforms mature, more questions are asked about the impact that modernization has had or may have on informal relationships between government institutions and their private or third sector partners, and internally among government institutions. This conference will focus on desirable and less than desirable trends that may have resulted from modernization of public management. 

The Conference will be hosted by the Department of Business and Social Studies of the University of Siena, Italy. The Conference will take place in the Certosa di Pontignano, which is part of the University of Siena. The Conference will begin on June 26th and will end on June 28th. The Conference will have limited attendance of a maximum of 45 participants. 

Papers that examine theoretical developments or propose innovative methodological approaches are welcome as well as empirical studies on relevant issues related to the changes caused by managerial reforms on both internal and external relationships in the public sector. One session of the Conference will be devoted to the topic of corruption. Papers dealing with this topic are welcomed. 

Due to the fact that IPMN Conferences seek to encourage in-depth discussion of the papers presented, the number of presentations will be limited. There will be an opportunity, however, to share accepted papers that cannot be presented in the plenary sessions among participants and to discuss them in an open scientific debate. All papers accepted will be included in the Conference program and made available on the conference website. Selected papers may be published through IPMN. 

Scholars interested in presenting a paper are requested to send an extended abstract (2 pages) before 30th November 2001 to each of the two Conference coordinators: 
Riccardo Mussari, Department of Business and Social Studies, University of Siena, Piazza S. Francesco, 7, 53100 Siena, Italy e-mail: mussari@unisi.it Kuno Schedler, Institute for Public Services and Tourism, University of St. Gallen, Varnbuelstrasse 19, 9000 St. Gallen, Switzerland e-mail: kuno.schedler@unisg.ch 

The decision to accept papers for presentation in the plenary sessions will be made after the submission of full papers which should be before 30th April. Decision on papers will be communicated to authors before 30th May, 2002. 

Conference Scientific Committee: Prof. Dr. Riccardo Mussari, Prof. Dr. Kuno Schedler, Prof. Dr. Lawrence R. Jones, Prof. Dr. Fred Thompson

 Accountability and NPM 

A critical element in the dialogue on NPM that critics seem to overlook is that one of the primary objectives associated with NPM-type reforms is to improve accountability. Ideally, because NPM is supposed to focus greater attention on markets, citizen-consumer satisfaction and transparency of government (to make what government does and data about performance more visible to citizens) than the regimes it replaces, i.e., NPM should result in more rather than less accountability of government to citizens. Whether this has occurred in nations that have implemented NPM-oriented reform is an important question. According to Jonathan Boston, Robert Gregory, Graham Scott, Derek Gill and others (see International Public Management Journal, 3/1 2001: Symposium on public management reform in New Zealand) who have participated in or analyzed the implementation of reforms in New Zealand for a dozen years or more, concerted effort to assess outcomes and citizen satisfaction was not performed well. Instead, far more attention was paid to evaluation of outputs within the government than to outcomes for the citizens it served. 

A related issue that has arisen in New Zealand and elsewhere is whether it is possible to evaluate outcomes adequately in the near-term so as to use this information to steer government policy. In Australia, outcome evaluation was never really implemented - the focus has been almost exclusively on evaluating the outputs.  This leads to conclusions that are not new to policy evaluation and policy analysis scholars that (a) evaluating the outcomes of government service is difficult, (b) to expect to perform such assessments satisfactorily in the short-term is unrealistic, and (c) such efforts are not likely to produce information of much value to government decision makers. Thus, it appears that Robert D. Behn (Rethinking Democratic Accountability. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2001) and other critics are correct when they point out that advocates of NPM reform have not yet solved the accountability problem despite having persuaded governments to invest considerable resources in survey research and other techniques intended to assess the nature of customer satisfaction with the services supplied by government or contractors. Until more and better research is done on how well such techniques yield useful information to service providers, and how citizen satisfaction data are utilized, the issue of whether NPM improves or diminishes accountability is open to question. 

Best Regards, 

Larry Jones IPMN Coordinator