benchmarking

benchmarking, technique of governance designed to improve the quality and efficiency of public services. In essence, benchmarking involves comparing specific aspects of a public problem with an ideal form of public action (the benchmark) and then acting to make the two converge. By making comparisons in this way, public administration is supposed to improve through processes of learning and emulation.

Of course, public administrations have always learned in the sense that they have changed as a reaction to evolving political, social, and economic circumstances. Since the 1980s, however, the conceptualization and systematic application of benchmarking has accelerated this process using ideas from the management of private businesses. Subsequently, at least three levels of usage of benchmarking can be identified. First, this technique has been used to encourage learning and emulation within organizations such as ministries and local authorities. Second, benchmarking has been used to encourage competitive learning between service providers, such as schools in the United Kingdom. Third, benchmarking concerns the transfer of policy instruments between states. Benchmarks are used frequently, for example, by international organizations such as the World Bank when encouraging administrative reforms in African countries.

Two different methodological approaches to benchmarking can be discerned. The first involves the sharing of standardized data on performance in specific issue areas—for example, equal pay for women. Here, statistics are used to encourage, or even politically embarrass, protagonists into striving to reach or surpass a benchmark. A second method is more qualitative, involving either self-assessment (particularly through responses to questionnaires) or organizational analysis carried out by independent researchers or consultants.

Although superficially benchmarks appear uncontroversial, they can create at least three types of governance problems. First, setting a benchmark often proves problematical. For example, one cannot simply assume that policy instruments that appear to be similar across countries were actually designed to tackle the same public problem. For instance, the multiple meanings given to “community policing” in Europe makes it difficult to establish benchmarks for “police on the beat” ratios. Second, proponents of benchmarks need to be aware that the contexts within which their comparisons are taking place evolve over time. Benchmarks for employment rates in periods of economic boom must be handled with care in times of recession. Finally, benchmarks are tools for inciting political change that need to be handled with care. “Naming and shaming” with benchmarks may bring about change in the short term but also institutionalized tension and resistance in the longer term. Thus, as with so many tools of contemporary public management, research concludes that benchmarks need to be used in a manner that is imaginative and appropriate rather than mechanical and imposed from above.