Performance Management and Policy Evaluation in the Netherlands

Abstract

In June 1999, the Netherlands government presented its new proposals on the structure, content and presentation of budget documents. The new style government budget should give answers to three simple questions: ‘What do we want to achieve? What will we do to achieve it? What will be the costs of our efforts?’After the budgetary year, the government annual report will have to answer the logical equivalents to these questions: ‘Have we achieved what we intended? Have we done what we should have done in achieving it? Did it cost what we had expected?’

The general purpose of the proposals is to make budget documents, and hence the budgetary process, more policy-oriented by presenting information on (intended and achieved) policy objectives, policy measures or instruments, and their costs.

In this article, I will focus in on the merits of the new style budget from a performance management and policy evaluation point of view. The central question is: will the new style budget indeed allow for a better geared employment of periodic (annual or cyclic) and less frequent information on policy outcomes and management output? And, if so, what are the chances of enhancing the utilization of the results of evaluation research by tuning its employment to the systematically available data of performance-oriented systems of planning and control?