Limitations and ambiguities of performance management in sustainable urban policy-making

Abstract The world is urbanizing at an unpreceded rate. Thus, exploring ways to govern larger and denser urban environments is an important social effort. It requires novel approaches to the governance of urban developments.... [ view full abstract ]

Abstract

The world is urbanizing at an unpreceded rate. Thus, exploring ways to govern larger and denser urban environments is an important social effort. It requires novel approaches to the governance of urban developments. The role of performance management in the governance of evolving urban policies needs to be further studied. In this paper, we are interested in how performance management is utilized to justify and support decisions concerning urban development. More particularly, we aim to explore limitations and ambiguities in performance management systems of urban policy-making. We provide a comprehensive theoretical scrutiny regarding the conceptual ambiguities of sustainability in urban development as well as the complicated inter-linkages between sustainability ideals and institutional performances in urban policy-making. The paper uses empirical data from the Finnish urban policy development, and more specifically, from three Finnish city regions to demonstrate the processes of design and use of performance evidence in urban policy-making. We argue that sustainability is an ambiguous policy goal, and cannot be tackled with simply measurable action. However, as measurement, validation and evidencing is what administrations are required to do, they learn to operate with the proxies that bring about sustainability. Therefore, in many accounts it becomes important to understand urban sustainability not only through the notion of “performance”, but also as performativity where urban policy actions are justified and legitimized through different forms of performance metrics, planning artefacts and calculated orders.