Assessing organization performance in public sector systems: lessons from Canada's MAF and New Zealand's PIF

Performance frameworks established by central agencies for monitoring organisational performance have been instituted by surprisingly few governments. The empirical literature focuses largely on policy and program performance systems in government whereas comprehending organizational performance and capacity issues has received much less attention This chapter focuses on relatively rare and relatively recent efforts to introduce organization-performance systems, and explores the implications for practice, theory, and research. Two approaches are compared, namely Canada’s Management Accountability Framework and New Zealand’s Performance Improvement Framework. We ask, for example, what have we learned about organizational-level performance improvement and performance management systems initiated by central governments thus far? The chapter looks at how these two organizational-performance approaches fit into the large array of ‘performance systems’ (Bouckaert & Halligan, 2008) found in the Canadian and New Zealand governments. These two systems are surprisingly and intriguingly different from each other.