For the past two decades, interest in the performance of local governments has become
high in public management. The wave of performance consciousness has thus far diffused
from developed countries to developing countries where decreasing public confidence and
trust in government has made the implementation of performance management policies a
way of improving public perception of government performance. Meanwhile, the
implementation of such policies is often based on untested assumptions some of which
constitute gaps in the literature. For instance, it is understood that performance
management systems enable public organisations that provide services to satisfy citizens’
demand for services. It is also assumed that mechanisms for managing organisational
performance recognise and address the interests of multiple stakeholders in an
organisational environment and that once performance management systems generate
performance information, decision makers are likely to use that information to advance the
goals of their organisations. This study explores these assertions by investigating
performance management practices of local government authorities in Ghana. It sets out to
understand how local governments manage organisational performance and what shapes
their performance. It also examines the scope of a performance enhancing policy to
determine whether it addresses multiple perspectives of organisational performance and the
extent to which local government managers use performance information to improve
service delivery. The study adopts a qualitative research approach by using data from
interviews, focus group discussions, observations and documents to construct and interpret
research findings.
This research identified internal and external mechanisms for managing local government
performance and found that central-local government relations allows the former to
influence the latter’s priorities by imposing on them, the national development policy, in
ways that define development planning, performance reporting and local government
controls. Following Kaplan and Norton (1992), a Balanced Score Card framework was
used to examine the scope of performance indicators used to assess the performance of
local governments under the District Development Facility. The findings reveal that
performance indicators tend to be skewed towards financial and internal organisational
aspects of performance rather than incorporating citizens’ views about local government
performance or promoting organisational learning, innovation and accountability. The
findings offer insights for re-examining multiple principal-agent relationships at the local
government level where the assessment of local government performance excludes the
opinions of local residents and affects local governments’ accountability to citizens.
Although developing a culture of performance emerged as a key factor for improving local
government performance, the findings revealed that the use of performance information by
local government managers to make decisions on service delivery depends on the
importance of performance information, their commitment to central government’s
priorities, reporting requirements of externally funded projects and public service
motivation. This study concludes that the utilisation of performance information to
improve service delivery is necessary but not sufficient without adopting an all-inclusive,
citizen-centred approach woven into the formulation, implementation and evaluation of
performance management systems in a developing country context.