Improving performance?: Exploring the complementarities between evaluation and performance management

Abstract

This article focuses on what some sceptics see as disillusionment with conventional evaluation practice, in that many governments experience only limited use of evaluation findings.This has contributed to a significant increase in results-based performance measurement. Yet not everyone in the evaluation community welcomes this development.The authors make the point that significant complementarities exist between evaluation and performance measurement and therefore the boundaries between these practices may need to be redefined. In other words, evaluators will need to enter into a constructive dialogue with performance management practitioners. By investigating their methodological similarities and differences, the authors argue that evaluation studies and performance measurement are highly complementary forms of knowledge production. Finally, they argue that evaluation tools may in fact strengthen a number of the identified shortcomings of performance measurement systems when applied in performance management. Copyright © 2008 SAGE Publications.