Quality Assurance for Public Administration: A Consensus Building Vehicle

Public administrations in all parts of the world are faced with multiple pressures to innovate and improve effectiveness and efficiency. Reforms range from New Public Administration (NPM) to other forms of reorganizations like gestion publique par contrats (France, Belgium) resulting in various forms of New Public Administrations (NPA). While many of these reforms may have proven successful, criticism vis-a`-vis all forms of public administrative reforms have increased. Neither NPM nor NPA have a documented track record of success and debates abound about the democratic legitimacy of NPM or the economic effectiveness of NPA. Concerned citizens and government officials alike are looking for methods to find a common ground to assess the quality of public administrations be they based on NPM or NPA. Quality assessment methods offer a transparent method of assessing the performance of public administrations. This article proposes such a quality method based on an adapted version of the ISO Quality guideline as recently developed by a working group within the Swiss national quality association.