The ‘‘Citizen-Initiated Performance Assessment’’ model is built upon the premise that citizens are not only the customers but also the owners, issue framers, co-producers, and evaluators of government (Epstein et al., 2000; King and Stivers, 1998; Schachter, 1997; Thomas, 1995). Customers select and pay for the services that they want, but do not have any direct authority over the service provider except for their indirect influence through market forces. In a democratic society, citizens are more than customers because they have the right as well as the responsibility to influence the decision-making process of the government and can hold public officials accountable for their budgetary and policy actions. Through their elected representatives, citizens indirectly determine what government should and should not do and how it should tax and spend taxpayers’
money. Citizens also influence government policies directly through their participation in citizen surveys, citizen committees and commissions, public
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meetings, and interactions with public officials, and indirectly through various civic organizations and special interest groups (Ebdon, 2002). They can also have direct influence on the delivery of public services by volun- teering in government programs and working with community organizations that co-produce public services with the government.
Despite these participatory channels, there has been a growing public distrust toward the institution of government for the past two decades (Ebdon and Franklin, 2005). Many citizens still do not feel that they understand how the government operates and what their tax money is used for. Many citizen groups also argue that the government is wasteful and inefficient, is bankrupted by special interest politics, and has lost the voice of the general citizenry. This trend has emerged despite the decades- long effort by managers and budgeters to measure the performance of government to ‘‘enhance public accountability’’.
This problem reflects a clear gap between what public officials try to measure and communicate to the public about their service efforts and accomplishment, and what citizens perceive through the mass media and personal experience. The problem cannot be attributed to lack of performance data, as past studies have found that many governments, big or small, have been collecting all kinds of output and outcome performance measures for internal purposes (Ho, 2003, 2005). What public officials need is a viable mechanism to connect the exercise of performance measurement with what the stakeholders and constituencies look for in terms of government performance. This is why citizens’ and other stakeholders’ input, especially at the local level, is important in performance measurement.
Figure 19.1 illustrates the conceptual framework and process of the
‘‘citizen-initiated performance assessment’’ model, in which citizens are a major contributor to the development of performance measures. Its core component is the formation of a ‘‘citizen performance team’’ comprised of city council members, administrators, and citizen representatives. These citizen representatives can be recruited from a variety of sources, such as the current membership of various citizen advisory boards and the leader- ship of neighborhood organizations, or by open public recruitment. If a city does a citywide survey regularly, it may also include a question in the survey asking for volunteer help and use this method to recruit new members into the team. It is essential to have a council representative and at least a staff representative on the team to build the tie with the city council and with various departments.
Once the initial citizen performance team is constituted, they should receive some orientation about the concept of performance measurement and the basics of city operations and the major responsibilities of different departments. The team then identifies specific services that they wish to
focus on to develop performance measures. To help the team become more familiar with the process first, it is recommended that they should only select one or two service areas initially and expand to other service areas later. This incremental approach also allows the performance team to re-examine their demographic composition and recruit other citizens and community representatives when they expand to other service areas and want a different representation of stakeholder interests in the CIPA process.
A two-step approach is recommended for developing performance measures for a specific service. First, in a meeting of about two hours, members of a citizen performance team are asked to identify the ‘‘critical elements’’ of a public service. For example, in a discussion about the police department, citizens may suggest that officers’ legal knowledge and compliance, the adequacy of their training, response time, and their professionalism in interacting with citizens, are critically important. In a discussion of street services, citizens may be more concerned about traffic flow, road safety, timeliness of repairs, accessibility of emergency services when needed, and clarity of signs and road marks.
These ‘‘critical elements’’ become the basis for developing performance measures. In the process of generating performance measures it is recom- mended that a facilitator be used to organize the discussion, ensure fair opportunities for all members to participate, and provide technical assistance if needed. A facilitator is especially helpful in the initial brain- storming process and the follow-up discussion to select specific Figure 19.1 The conceptual framework of CIPA.
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performance measures. In this process, the facilitator and the performance team may use the following criteria to guide the discussion:
Are the measures helpful to citizens in evaluating the performance of the service? Can ordinary citizens understand the measures?
Are the measures quantifiable and clearly defined?
Is there data available? Will it be too costly and time-consuming to collect it? Is the value of the information worth the time investment and cost?
A worksheet can be used to help citizens think through these criteria and ensure that performance measures truly reflect the concerns and priorities of citizens, rather than city officials (see Table 19.1 for an example). Also, the worksheet offers an opportunity to compare the value of different measures, eliminate duplication, and prioritize data collection tasks for city staff.
After performance measures are developed, the third stage of CIPA focuses on data collection, review of measures based on quality of data, and the dissemination of information to the public. While departmental staff bear the primary responsibility for data collection, citizens can contri- bute to the process by reviewing data collection instruments, such as citizen or user surveys, and by sharing some data collection tasks, such as volunteering to hand out user surveys in a public library or recreation center.
After the performance data is collected, the fourth and the fifth stages of the CIPA process involve the transfer of the measures and data to the city council. Usually, a meeting between the CIPA performance team and the entire council should be held to allow the CIPA team to discuss
Table 19.1 Worksheet for Evaluating Performance Measures Service
Performance Measures brain-stormed by citizens
Rating from 1 to 4 (1ẳleast useful, 4ẳmost useful) Useful to
citizens?
Understandable and clear to citizens?
Useful to department?
1.
2.
3.
etc.
their assessment of the data and formally ask the city council to take into consideration the citizens’ perspective. This step is critically important to the success of CIPA. By having an opportunity to look at the data and performance results together, citizens and elected officials can have a constructive dialog about how public services should be improved, what constraints the government faces, and what the public can do to help. This also creates a landmark showing the results of the hard work by citizen representatives, and further enhances the legitimacy and political buy-ins of the measures for elected and departmental officials.
Once this is completed, it is important to integrate CIPA into the decision- making process of the city council. Work sessions for city council members can be organized to help them understand possible applications of the measures and data. This activity is especially important to cities that do not have a history of using performance measurement. A facilitator may be used to provide technical support and coordinate the discussion to see how the citizen-initiated performance measures can be used in strategic planning, budgeting, program evaluation, and policy development.
It should be noted that the citizen performance team is only a bridge to the larger public in evaluating the quality of public services. While the size of the performance team cannot be too big for efficiency purposes, other mechanisms of public input, such as general citizen surveys, user group surveys, customer service hotlines, and complaint statistics, should be used to ensure that the performance of public services is not evaluated by a small group of citizens who may not be representative of the population or the user group. The choice of these methods depends on the nature of the service and public concerns, the target audience, the structural character- istics of a community, and the administrative capacity of the government (Ebdon, 2000; Thomas, 1993; Walters et al., 2000). What is important here is to develop a portfolio of these mechanisms so that the results of CIPA can reflect the diverse perspectives of a community and its service users.