Public Budgeting in Search for an Identity

State of the Art and Future Challenges

Maria Francesca Sicilia, Ileana Steccolini, Maria Francesca Sicilia, Ileana Steccolini

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Topic: Business
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000329612
• Subtopic: Finance
• Index: Business

Public Budgeting in Search for an Identity: State of the Art and Future Challenges provides a state-of-the-art reflection on current trends in international public budgeting, representing an important pillar in the accumulation of knowledge on public sector budgeting processes, contents, evolutions and critical issues.

Budgeting is central in public sector organizations. It performs a complex variety of functions, being the arena where multiple actors, cultures and professional identities interact, making it an extremely fascinating field and topic of investigation. There is a significant need and scope for exploring budgeting processes in the public sector today, as a consequence of the managerial waves of reforms that have taken place over the last few decades and the implementation of austerity programmes – as well as in light of current trends, including emerging challenges related to community care and wellbeing, rising inequality, people flows, climate change, pandemics, and the persistence of democratic deficits. The chapters in this volume address critical issues on this broad topic, offering new perspectives on current evolutions in public budgeting, including, among others, participatory budgeting, performance budgeting, the budgetary slack resources and the need to ensure balance between budget control and flexibility. These contributions show that public budgeting can, and must remain, the subject of enduring interest in our studies.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Public Management Review.

Insights into performance-based budgeting in the public sector: a literature review and a research agenda

Sara Giovanna Mauro, Lino Cinquini and Giuseppe Grossi

ABSTRACT

In the spirit of New Public Management (NPM), performance-based budgeting (PBB) has (re-)attracted the interest of both academics and practitioners. A wide variety of approaches and results have enlivened the debate on this topic, but the growing amount of theoretical and empirical works calls for systematization. Therefore, a systematic review is carried out on public management and accounting studies published in international academic journals from 1990 to 2014. Through descriptive and thematic investigations, this article explores the results achieved to date and identifies gaps and avenues for future research, answering two questions: What has been done? What else should be done?

Introduction

During the New Public Management (NPM) era, the shift from a focus on input to a focus on results has led to an ‘increase in the amount of information and change in the type of information generated and used for budgeting and management purposes’ (Kristensen, Groszyk, and Buhler 2002, 10). It has renewed the attention by both practitioners and academics to the budgetary use of performance information (OECD 2007), which this work refers to as performance-based budgeting (PBB). PBB is designed to develop information about results and use it in both the budgeting process and the allocation of resources.

Despite the relevant body of literature on PBB and the wide variety of research findings, surprisingly there has not been any systematization of the knowledge regarding PBB. Previous academic reviews have broadly investigated the research patterns in accounting (Broadbent and Guthrie 2008; Goddard 2010), focused on the more general stream of literature on performance measurement and management (Modell 2009; Van Helden, Johnsen, and Vakkuri 2008; Van Helden and Reichard 2013), or alternatively, on the evolution of the public budget (Anessi- Pessina et al. 2016). In these works, PBB has played only a marginal role. Robinson and Brumby (2005) conducted a review of the topic, but focusing on the empirical literature on output-based hospital funding systems. Therefore, the claim of the paper is that not enough attention has been given to reviewing and systematizing empirical and theoretical knowledge regarding PBB, and this work is thus an attempt to fill this gap through a systematic review of the literature (Tranfield, Denyer, and Smart 2003).

Systematic review may be defined as ‘a review of the literature according to an explicit, rigorous, and transparent methodology’ (Greenhalgh et al. 2004, 582). Widely used in the medical sciences, it has been applied more recently to management research to counteract the bias of traditional literature reviews and enhance the ‘legitimacy and authority of the resultant evidence’ (Tranfield, Denyer, and Smart 2003, 208). Therefore, a contribution of this work is methodological since a systematic review of the literature in the field of public management/administration and accounting is conducted to guarantee the reliability of the evidence produced (De Vries, Bekkers, and Tummers 2015).

Similar to Broadbent and Guthrie, who reviewed 20 years of accounting research, the current work is designed to answer two questions: ‘What has been done?’ and ‘What could be done?’ (Broadbent and Guthrie 2008). Indeed, the review has a twofold purpose: (a) to understand PBB by systematizing the results achieved until now; and (b) to map relevant previous contributions to highlight overstated and overlooked areas and thus address a possible future agenda. Accordingly, the review is designed to contribute to the current body of knowledge by describing how previous works have addressed the topic under investigation (Descriptive analysis), synthesizing the main themes investigated until now and determining new research questions (Thematic analysis).

To fulfil these purposes, the research process underwent different phases. First, the research protocol was defined and the search process carried out (Review design). This process resulted in a set of papers that were analysed and codified (Descriptive analysis). Then, the content of these papers was subjected to further investigation in an attempt to provide an answer to the first research question, ‘What has been done?´, as discussed in the section with the same name. According to the analysis, relevant issues were suggested for further analysis, thus addressing the second research question, ‘What could be done?’ (Discussion: What could be done?). In the last working phase, the main findings were summarized and conclusions were drawn (Conclusion).

Review design

A systematic review designed to be both methodologically rigorous and theoretically sound was carried out through a well-documented process (Tranfield, Denyer, and Smart 2003). Each of the following subsections illustrates a stage of this process.

Search strategy

The systematic search began with an identification of the keywords. This was a dynamic process aimed at finding search terms suitable for reflecting the variety of labels coined and used by practitioners and scholars. As demonstrated by the scoping study (Tranfield, Denyer, and Smart 2003), performance, output, outcome and results are all concepts at the heart of the current debate on the topic and partly explain the different expressions used (e.g., Diamond 2005). Our search process used these terms and some acronyms (Appendix 1).

We were interested in discovering the different contributions from the fields of public management/administration and accounting, which are the most relevant disciplines in studies of public sector performance measurement and management (Modell 2009; Van Helden, Johnsen, and Vakkuri 2008). Thus, a variety of databases, powered by Google (Google Scholar), EBSCOHost (Business Source Complete), Jstor (Jstor: Arts and Science I and II collection – Business collection) and Thomson Reuters (Web of Science), were selected to frame the search. They were used in combination, or alternatively, by previous literature reviews on adjacent topics (e.g., Boyne 2003; Kroll 2015).

In addition, four search strings guided the selection of papers:

• First parameter (language): To avoid translation problems, only papers written in English were selected.

• Second parameter (time frame): The review included ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Public budgeting in search for an identity: state of the art and future challenges
• 1 Insights into performance-based budgeting in the public sector: a literature review and a research agenda
• 2 Linking budgeting to results? Evidence about performance budgets in European municipalities based on a comparative analytical model
• 3 The design of performance budgeting processes and managerial accountability relationships
• 4 Balancing budget control and flexibility: the central finance agency as ‘responsive regulator’
• 5 Fiscal slack, budget shocks, and performance in public organizations: evidence from public schools
• 6 Democracy, governmentality and transparency: participatory budgeting in action
• 7 Budgeting and the construction of entities: struggles to negotiate change in Swedish municipalities
• Index