BUDGETING, NEGOTIATIONS AND BOUNDARIES: Examples from Swedish municipalities

Budgeting has a long-standing tradition within the public sector. Despite changes in management ideals from the Old Public Administration (OPA) to New Public Management (NPM) and, more recently, towards New Public Governance... [ view full abstract ]

Budgeting has a long-standing tradition within the public sector. Despite changes in management ideals from the Old Public Administration (OPA) to New Public Management (NPM) and, more recently, towards New Public Governance (NPG), it has persisted as an important technology for controlling public sector value creation. Swedish local governments are an especially good example of this, because they are required by law to employ a transparent and efficient budget process in order to ensure that political ends are met and that resources are allocated efficiently. In this paper, we argue that budgeting has persisted in OPA and NPM because it is a control technology that goes well with the ideas of autonomous, bounded, and efficient single-purpose organizations. In the paper, we show that budgeting participates in the construction and enforcement of traditional boundaries concerning resource use, performance evaluation and management: because budgeting rests on the idea that organizations are supposed to use their own resources to produce their own results, budget processes tend to make it difficult to challenge traditional boundaries and employ new solutions to management and governance problems. We suggest that these issues of boundary construction and enforcement have been somewhat neglected in earlier literature on budgeting and public management, because they have focused on political, economic and managerial questions rather than questions about the ongoing construction of boundaries. As such, we propose that studies regarding public sector budgeting, performance management and governance may benefit from more constructivist approaches when looking for problems and solutions in the new era of NPG.