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Teaching and unit evaluations surveys are used to assess the quality of teaching and the quality of the unit of study. An analysis of teaching and unit evaluation survey practices in Australian universities suggests significant changes. One key change discussed in the paper is the shift from voluntary to mandatory use of surveys with the results used to assess and reward academic staff performance. The change in the direction is largely driven by the introduction of performance‐based funding as part of quality assurance arrangements. The paper aims to outline the current trends and changes and the implications in the future such as increased scrutiny of teaching and intrusion to academic autonomy.

The paper is based on the analysis of current teaching and unit evaluation practices across the Australian university sector. The paper presents the case of an Australian university that has introduced performance‐based reward using various measures to assess and reward academic staff such as the outcome of student satisfaction surveys. The analysis of external quality audit findings related to teacher and unit evaluations is also presented.

The findings suggest a shift in trend from the use of voluntary to mandatory tools to assess and reward quality teaching. The case of an Australian university outlined in the paper and the approach taken by seven other universities is largely driven by performance‐based funding. One of the key concerns for many in higher education is the intrusion of academic autonomy with increased focus on outcomes and less emphasis on resources needed to produce excellence in learning and teaching and research. The increased reliance on student happiness as a measure of educational quality raises the questions on whether high student satisfaction would strengthen academic rigour and student attainment of learning outcomes and generic skills which are seen as key factors in graduate exit standards.

The renewal of quality assurance and performance‐based funding using student satisfaction as a measure of educational quality will result in increased use of student voice to assess learning and teaching outcomes. Such direction will increase the accountability on academics to improve student experience and the measures will be used to assess academic staff performance.

The paper outlines the trends and changes in the teacher and unit evaluations in Australian universities and its implications in the future. The paper also provides a case of an Australian university that has recently made teacher and unit evaluations compulsory with the results used in academic staff annual performance review and linking reward with performance outcomes.

Universities globally have faced the introduction of research performance assessment systems that provide monetary and ranking rewards based on publication outputs. This study aims to seek an understanding of the implementation of performance-based research funding (PBRF) and its impact on the heads of departments (HoDs) and accounting academics in New Zealand (NZ) tertiary institutions. The study explores NZ accounting academics’ experiences and their workload; the relationship between teaching and research in the accounting discipline and any issues and concerns affecting new and emerging accounting researchers because of PBRF.

Applying an institutional theoretical lens, this paper explores accounting HoDs’ perceptions concerning the PBRF system’s impact on their academic staff. The research used semi-structured interviews to collect data from NZ’s eight universities.

The key findings posit that many institutional processes, some more coercive in nature, whereas others were normative and mimetic, have been put in place to ensure that academics are able to meet the PBRF requirements. HoDs suggest that their staff understand the importance of research, but that PBRF is a challenge to new and emerging researchers and pose threats to their recruitment. New academics must “hit the ground running” as they must demonstrate not only teaching abilities but also already have a track record of research publications; all in all, a daunting experience for new academics to overcome. There is also a teaching and research disconnect. Furthermore, many areas where improvements can be made in the design of this measurement tool remain.

The PBRF system has significantly impacted on accounting academics. Central university research systems were established that subsequently applied coercive institutional pressures onto line managers to ensure that their staff performed. This finding offers scope for future research to explore a better PBRF that measures and rewards research productivity but without the current system’s unintended negative consequences.

This chapter considers internationalisation strategies to promote international student recruitment and mobility as the central tools of contemporary universities operating in a global and competitive context. It presents an overview of these strategies in the public university context in Italy, which serves as a case study to highlight how universities increasingly give relevance to the internationalisation of education in their strategic plans to attract overseas students and encourage incoming and outgoing student mobility. The document-based analysis of the Italian case reveals a prominent commitment from public universities to promoting internationalisation through different strategic performance objectives that contribute to the internationalisation of students and fuel their mobility and recruitment on a global scale. This research provides empirical evidence of the saliency of the internationalisation of education within the strategic missions of universities. It also addresses the connection between the internationalisation of university education and performance-based funding.

State funding is being reduced for higher education institutes (HEIs) is linked to several checks such as performance-based incentives (Hagood, 2019). This forces HEIs to look for other options for funding. Endowment funds are now becoming the main source of revenue for HEIs (Sörlin, 2007), largely provided by alumni. Thus, this study aims to examine the factors that lead to donor behavior in terms of university endowment funds.

Based on a sample of 627 participants in the survey from public universities in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) and 625 from public/private universities of the United States of America (USA), the authors conducted a cross-sectional survey-based analysis. Hypotheses were tested with regression analysis.

The results revealed that in the USA, donors with substantial prestige within the institution are more likely to contribute to the endowment fund; however, in the KSA, this relationship was insignificant. Additionally, this study found that participation, brand interpretation and satisfaction positively impact identification with an organization, leading to donor behavior.

This research has successfully identified psychological factors for endowment funding; however, mediating or moderating variables affecting donor behavior should also be considered. Further, this study considers only two countries, the KSA and the USA; therefore, a larger cross-cultural context warrants more investigation.

Overall results revealed several means through which the administrators and practitioners may efficiently manage and increase university endowment funds flow. This study's novelty is to conduct a cross-national investigation and identify the psychological factors of donation behavior toward university endowment funds, providing an opportunity for HEIs to understand the psychological factors in detail and motivate their alumni to be one of the important sources of funding even in developing countries.

Many psychological factors underlie alumni's engagement in volunteerism and donation activities, especially in cross-national settings. Following social identity theory, this study explored identity-based donor behavior in terms of supporting universities through endowment funding.

This paper studies how performance funding of education is perceived by principals, teachers and administrative staff and management. The dysfunctionality of performance measures often reflects how the measures prevent an organisation from achieving its goals. This paper proposes that perceptions of dysfunctionality can be analysed by separating the perceptions of the programme's intentions, of the school-level actions and of the outcomes for students.

Following a qualitative methodology, semi-structured interviews were conducted with teachers, school management, staff specialists and top management in a large Danish municipality when outcome-based funding was introduced.

The performance-funding programme affected teaching by changing educational priorities. Different perceptions of the (dys)functionality of intentions, actions and outcomes fuelled diverging responses. Although the performance measure was generally considered incomplete, interviewees' perceptions of the financial incentivisation and the dysfunctionality of actions depended on interpretations of the incentivisation and student-related outcomes of the programme.

Dysfunctionality can be contested; the interpretations of the intention of a performance-funding programme affect the perceived dysfunctionality of reactions. Both technical characteristics of funding schemes and administrators' and principals' mediating roles are essential for the consequences of performance funding.

The paper examines conditions for dysfunctionality of performance measures. We demonstrate that actions can be perceived as dysfunctional because of a measurement's intentions, actions themselves and the actions' outcomes. Further, the paper illustrates how the reception of performance funding depends on how consequences are enacted based on educators' interpretations of the (dys)functionality of intentions, actions and outcomes.

This study examines key adaptations that occurred in the Zimbabwean Results-Based Financing (RBF) programme between 2010 and 2017, locating the endogenous and exogenous factors that required adaptive response and the processes from which changes were made.

The study is based on a desk review and thematic analysis of 64 policy and academic literatures supplemented with 28 multi-stakeholder interviews.

The programme experienced substantive adaption between 2010 and 2017, demonstrating a significant level of responsiveness towards increasing efficiency as well as to respond to unforeseen factors that undermined RBF mechanisms. The programme was adaptive due to its phased design, which allowed revision competencies and responsive adaptation, which provide useful insights for other low-and-middle income countries (LMICs) settings where graduated scale-up might better meet contextualised needs. However, exogenous factors were often not systematically examined or reported in RBF evaluations, demonstrating that adaptation could have been better anticipated, planned, reported and communicated, especially if RBF is to be a more effective health system reform tool.

RBF is an increasingly popular health system reform tool in LMICs. However, there are questions about how exogenous factors affect RBF performance and acknowledgement that unforeseen endogenous programme design and implementation factors also greatly affect the performance of RBF. As a result, a better understanding of how RBF operates and adapts to programme level (endogenous) and exogenous (external) factors in LMICs is necessary.

The purpose of this paper is to compare the different performance-based budgeting models used in the judiciaries of three European countries: Italy, Finland and the Netherlands. In particular, this paper focusses on the criteria adopted by these three countries to fund the courts, and it analyses the effects of these criteria on the distribution of resources and performance variability among first instance courts.

This exploratory research is based on a literature review and data analysis of three case studies. Equity in resource distribution and equality in courts' performance are assessed using the coefficient of variation.

The preliminary findings suggest the following: (1) funding models with a close link between performance and budget better guarantee equitable allocation of resources among courts and, therefore, more equal performance among courts within a country; (2) unbalanced allocation of resources is associated with disparities among courts in terms of judicial efficiency and effectiveness and consequently, unequal treatment of/outcomes for citizens coming before the law.

This paper is part of a broader research project aimed at analysing the impact of performance budgeting on the efficiency, quality, organization and values of judiciaries. This study only considers quantitative aspects of performance, but it will be followed by further analysis that will explore performance and judicial budgeting from other perspectives.

This paper describes examples of three different models of performance-based judicial budgeting from other countries, which aim to reform the budgeting processes of the judiciaries in question. The paper emphasizes the importance of adopting rational and transparent funding criteria in order to ensure judicial independence and accountability and to balance courts' performance, guaranteeing the principle that every citizen must obtain the same treatment before the law.

This paper contributes to the existing performance-based budgeting literature by studying its application to the judiciary, which, due to its peculiarities, is an area that has been overlooked in previous studies and deserves further attention. This study contributes to the court administration literature by exploring the issue of budgeting, which, despite its importance, is still a neglected subject.

This chapter quotes how St. John, Daun-Barnett, and Moronski-Chapman (2012) maintained ideological shifts in American culture and politics which are important to the study of higher education policy because of the influence on public finance, government regulation, and curriculum. From the Great Depression through the Cold War to the present, human capital theory has guided higher education (St. John et al., 2012). Veiled concepts of accessibility and equity were substantial during this era to mask more nefarious attempts to shift to the privatization away from the public good of American Higher Education (Astin & Oseguera, 2004). This chapter focuses on the role of accountability as a neoliberal ideology, and the impact of this ideology, as a form of corporatization on higher education. Furthermore, this focus on corporatization intersects specifically with the discourse pertaining to corporate social responsibility (CSR), which can be understood as transparent actions that guide an organization to benefit society, such as in funding and accessibility. In this chapter, the authors engage in a critical analysis of neoliberalism, and academic capitalism, as threats to the institution of higher education as a public good. The authors initially provide a framing of the public to private dichotomy of American higher education in explaining the various products produced and expected outcomes. A historical context for performance-based funding in American higher education is provided as an understanding of the nature and scope of the contemporary model. To understand the influence of public funding policies on American higher education, it is also necessary to comprehend the role of political ideology and how the business model of higher education has evolved. Thus, a general discussion of neoliberalism permeates the entirety of this discussion. This chapter concludes with the tertiary impacts of neoliberalism.

Australian universities have a rich history for enabling, promoting and evaluating innovation and excellence in learning and teaching. Universities have used this practice to respond to drivers from government and the changing global educational environment, as well as accommodating for the characteristics of Australian universities such as scale, equity of access and the balance of domestic and international students. Often through institutional collaborations, educators have challenged pedagogical practices and introduced and tested innovative ways to enhance student learning, which has contributed to an international reputation for quality learning and teaching. However, the recent removal of specific government funding to support innovation, the increased emphasis on student success and employability outcomes and the threat of performance-based funding means that Australian universities will need to commit to the ongoing development of learning and teaching and demonstrate the potential for learning gain.

This article studies the tensions between universities' accountability and autonomy in response to the demands of public steering mechanisms coordinating higher education institutions.

Demonstrating the tension between accountability and autonomy, the impact and relevance of public steering mechanisms coordinating higher education are studied via a survey with selected representative Finnish universities. The response rate was an exceptionally high 94%. In addition to the statistical analysis of the survey, open-ended questions were also analyzed to give a more in-depth understanding of the findings. The study uses paradox theory and institutional complexity as its theoretical lenses.

The empirical analysis of this study shows a considerable gap between the experienced impact and the experienced relevance of the steering mechanisms in higher education. The authors’ further analysis of the open-ended data shows that indicator-based funding allocation has undermined the perceived university autonomy. The authors highlight the paradoxical tensions of university autonomy and higher education institutions' steering mechanisms' requirement for accountability. Finding an acceptable balance between accountability and institutional autonomy plays an important role in designing higher education policies.

The authors found that even if a steering mechanism is experienced as impactful, it is not necessarily considered relevant. One of the key aspects in understanding the reasons behind this mismatch is related to university autonomy. Most impactful steering mechanisms become considered less relevant because they also endanger institutional autonomy. In this sense, it could be expected that steering mechanisms should better balance accountability and autonomy.