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Performance measurements have become a prominent part of government steering of public agencies. At the same time, they are increasingly criticized for creating heavy administrative burdens. The purpose of this paper is to argue that consent on part of the heads of agencies is vital for making performance measurement an efficient tool for not only control but also organizational learning.

The paper reports a survey with a nearly total sample of Swedish Director Generals.

Findings suggest that Director Generals who feel that they are able to influence the goals and indicators of their agencies are significantly more willing to consent to the government’s reporting requirements.

The paper suggests that a more encompassing, interactive and participatory process might increase agency consent with reporting requirements.

The purpose of this paper is to study the changing relationship between auditing and evaluation. Over the past several years, supreme auditing institutions (SAIs) in a number of advanced democracies have evolved from conventional auditing institutions to becoming increasingly concerned with assisting policy change and administrative reform in the public sector; tasks that are traditionally associated with evaluation. The paper discusses the potential consequences of this development for the SAIs themselves as well as for the audited and reforming institutions and for policy-making.

The paper uses qualitative method and draws on the extensive literature on auditing and evaluation. The analysis has also benefitted from the authors’ recent comparative research on SAIs.

The findings, summarized in six points, are that the growth of auditing in areas previously assigned to evaluators, has led to a shortened time perspective; stronger emphasis on the administration of policies; increased focus on efficiency of the audited entity; greater independence from the evaluated organizations; a shift in receiver of information toward the legislature and/or the public; and improved communication.

Evaluation as a professional and scholarly field has developed theories and advanced methods to assess the effectiveness of public programs. The growth of auditing may thus change the focus and quality of policy evaluation.

The paper speaks to both scholars and practitioners. To the best of the knowledge a similar analysis has not been done before.

Many developed countries have seen significant reforms of their health systems for the last few decades. Despite extensive investment in these changes, health systems still face a range of challenges which reform efforts do not seem to have overcome. The purpose of this paper is to argue that there are two particular reasons, which go beyond the standard explanations of changing demographics and disease profiles.

The paper is a commentary based on the literature.

The first explanation relates to the relationship between substantive health care reform and governance reform. These are intertwined processes and the pattern of interaction has distorted both types of reform. Second, reform has multiple meanings and may sometimes be more of an intra-organizational ritual and routine than a coherent plan aiming to bring about particular changes. As such, part of the reason why reform so frequently fails to bring about change is that it was not actually intended to bring about specific changes in the first place. The limited success of reform in recent years, the authors argue, has been a result of the fact that reform has focused too much on the substantive aspects of healthcare, while ignoring the governance aspect of the sector.

As a result, governance has often been obstructed by interest groups inside the system, resulting in paralysis. The authors conclude by arguing that substantive reform of public organizations without an accompanying reassessment of the governance of these organizations are more likely to fail, compared to more comprehensive reform efforts.

Building on perspectives from the study of multilevel governance, migrants' inclusion and emergency management, this article asks how differences across national regulations for foreign residents, work eligibility and access to national emergency supports intersected with local approaches in responding to migrants.

This article examines national policy adjustments and parallel subnational governance early in the pandemic for three groups of foreign residents: international students, technical interns and co-ethnics with long-term visas, primarily Brazilians and Peruvians. It uses Japanese-language documents to trace national policy responses. To grasp subnational governance, the article analyzes coverage in six Japanese regional newspapers from northern, central and western Japan, for the period of April 1 to October 1, 2020.

National policies obstructed or enabled migrants' treatment as members of the local community but did not dictate this membership, which varied according to migrant group. Migrants' relationship to the community affected available supports.

The article brings together perspectives on multilevel governance, emergency management and migrants' inclusion. It exposes how different migrant groups' ties to the local community affected access to supports.

Despite Max Weber’s assertion that bureaucracy is domination on the basis of knowledge, mainstream public administration literature has paid little attention to the role of experts and expertise in bureaucratic organisations. A particular blind spot concerns the academic professions or disciplines that supply the experts and expert knowledge used in government bureaucracies. It is well known that the educational composition of the civil service varies across countries and over time. However, knowledge about what explains the varying position of expert professions within state bureaucracies is scarce. The chapter examines this issue through a comparative-historical investigation of the role in government of a particular expert profession, namely economists. Focusing on a small set of countries – Norway, Denmark, New Zealand and Ireland – over the period from 1930 to 1990, it poses the question: How can we account for the variation in the position of economists within government bureaucracies across countries and over time? To answer this question, the chapter draws on theory from the sociological literature on professions and historical-institutionalist work on the influence of economic ideas.

Through an examination of macro-historical studies on the governance of Iran, the purpose of this study is to identify the most significant and important events and trends in the rise and fall of Iranian governments and introduce alternative futures in a range of possible, plausible and preferable forms of future governance. To carry out a foresight study of alternative futures of Iranian governance, the authors used futures studies, based on the detection of the most critical driving forces, which are also the most important uncertainties. Futures studies as an interdisciplinary field of study help to identify the events and trends that affect political change and offer scenarios of four alternative futures for the governance of Iran: Smart and Stable Government, Authoritarian Development-oriented Government, Irrational Government and Irrational Breakable Government. The authors believe that Iran’s endeavors to promote democracy, taking the changing international trends into account, make a more trustworthy future for Iran both possible plausible.

Based on macro-history approach and by using “shared history”, future triangle and then scenario planning, the future of Governance in Iran has been analyzed.

Whenever the government has distanced itself from the public and has neglected the trend of international change, it has been faced with a period of collapse and annihilation. And whenever these two important factors are understood, the result is a trend of development and growth. Therefore, the most favored image of Iran’s future relies on the maintenance and promotion of public participation and on increasing attention to the sustainable realities of international relations.

The complexities of events and trends affecting the rise and fall of previous governments of Iran make it necessary to use an interdisciplinary approach to understand the events that have emerged or are emerging in its governance. In this study, from futures studies point of view, transformation of governance has been studied.