Given the prevailing emphasis on agency performance, customer focus, stakeholder’s interests and other methods of assessment under new public administration and prevailing managerialism in many public sectors around the world, administrative practitioners have taken to benchmarking as an...

This report on making better use of information to drive improvement in local public services was commissioned from the School of Public Policy at the University of Birmingham, by the Audit Commission. It explores how decision makers use information when making decisions. These decision makers...

<title>Abstract</title> Complexity theory demonstrates that there are fundamental conceptual difficulties in the concepts of ‘planning' in any open system which contains a significant level of decentralization of decision making. This paper presents a revised conceptual framework for strategic management in...

The Best Value (BV) regime in UK local government became mandatory on 1 April 2000. This paper explores the international sources of the ideas behind BV. It maps out the evolution of BV from an approach primarily directed at achieving high quality local services into an approach which is...