Pages: 45

No chapter abstract available.

Pages: 15

Accounting, management control and risk management are critical components of financial management and accountability in the public sector. While prior studies have improved our understanding of public sector management, new global circumstances raise new issues. The global pandemic Covid-19 has introduced unprecedented risks, challenges and pressures on public organizations worldwide. In this new world, there is evidence of an increasing demand for accounting, management control and risk management innovations for new processes and practices. Thus, our understanding of how public sector accounting, management control, risk management and sustainability practices can assist public organizations in navigating and surviving in an environment of crises and associated challenges is currently minimal yet essential. In this new pandemic-normal world, this chapter illustrates that there is already evidence of increasing demand for innovations and new processes for improving public sector performance and enhancing accountability. We show how accounting through the process of accurate and transparent financial and non-financial information can support public sector stakeholders, including government, citizens, investors and regulators. Through the analysis of the chapters in this book, we argue that management control, risk management and sustainability can help public sector organizations innovate and develop new processes for improving performance and accountability.

Pages: 14

In analysing the early Singaporean response to Covid-19, insights are drawn into neoliberalism and the temporalization of a citizenry. The corpus of documentary coverage of |Covid-19 from the first half of 2020 to the first quarter of 2022 is examined in terms of budgeting and health policy decisions made by government. The frames of neoliberalism and temporalization provide a focus. This study reveals that Singapore has adopted a variant of neoliberalism over the last four decades. In its health policies, concepts of shared responsibility have meshed with budgeting principles based on generational views of the citizenry. On that foundation, and with lessons learned from the 2003 SARS epidemic, Singapore was quick to respond to Covid-19 in terms of health policies and budgets. Its substantial response involved the use of past financial reserves rather than government debt without adopting a balance-sheet view of the strategy. Singaporean neoliberalism privileges individual decision-making within caveats formed by generational relationships and societal structures. A Singaporean city-state model of neoliberalism reveals possible future mutations of an eco-political philosophy dominant in other parts of the world. This chapter extends studies of temporalization as a foundation to the implementation of neoliberal policies.

Pages: 14

The focus of this chapter is on managing grand challenges strategically in public sector organizations. This builds on an increased research interest in how to tackle grand challenges – challenges that cut organizational boundaries and responsibilities. When attempting to tackle grand challenges, there is no time to wait for large structural initiatives; instead, action from the bottom up and at the local level is needed. The chapter discusses an ongoing strategic process within the city of Gothenburg with the ambition to tackle criminality and segregation. The chapter further discusses what new routines are established and how performance can be measured and managed in an organizational setting across boundaries but with a long-term, shared, goal. In sum, the chapter focuses on grand challenges in the public sector, strategic management, inclusiveness, measurability and accountability.

Pages: 30

No chapter abstract available.

Pages: 14

This chapter covers the development of digital technology in audit at the UK’s Supreme Audit Institution, the National Audit Office. It argues that this represented a case of institutional entrepreneurship in which often quite junior members of staff drove change. They did this using their own experiences of working on financial audit. Senior managers who were alert to the challenge of using data permitted this to happen. This case study has implications for the literature on institutional entrepreneurship, where it supports the case that entrepreneurship happens when entrepreneurs are able to mobilize rhetorical and other resources to enable change. It also has implications for the literature about Supreme Audit Institutions where it demonstrates the importance of competition with the private sector and justifications for audit excellence coming from within the profession.

Pages: 14

Change and crisis are concepts often intertwined. In the public sector, ideas related to New Public Management (and associated accounting changes) were themselves introduced, from the 1970s onwards, in response to ballooning public sector expenditure and perceived widespread inefficiencies, presented, at the time, as impending crises themselves. Existing accounting literature has frequently seen change mainly as a reaction to external pressures and shocks; this view particularly strengthened in recent years as a reaction to emergencies, such as the Covid-19 pandemic, the 2008 Great Recession and ongoing climate-change challenges. Crises can provide the conditions for great reforms and the opportunity to develop new systems. In light of the long history and research on public sector accounting change and the more recent developments on crisis, this chapter sets out to provide some possible lenses to reinterpret processes of accounting change and their relationship with crises. The contribution concludes by suggesting possible ways forward in the form of broad new research themes.

Pages: 62

No chapter abstract available.

Pages: 15

The purpose of this chapter is to explore the tensions of collaborative innovation projects in the public sector and how they can be dealt with via the use of different control forms. An additional purpose is to understand how the use of those controls evolves over time due to an unexpected crisis (Covid-19). The chapter draws upon public management and management control literature combined with empirical observations from a collaborative innovation project implemented at Perstorp Municipality in Sweden. The project, called Digital Innovation for Dementia Care (DIDEC), aimed at developing innovative products/services for dementia care. Based on the findings achieved through interventionist research conducted over three and half years, this chapter shows how tensions arising in collaborative innovation projects in the public sector can be successfully dealt with by progressively balancing the use of formal and informal control forms in different parts of the project organization and during the different stages of the project implementation. However, this balance was suddenly destabilized by a crisis. It was threatened by the outbreak of Covid-19, which led to the dominance of formal controls focusing on the achievement of predetermined targets, thereby neglecting the (unexpected) added value resulting from the project.

Pages: 17

A central challenge in public management is the generation of outcomes from major infrastructure developments. Major infrastructure projects disrupt local lifestyles and the environment, and accordingly their proponents often confront a hostile public and social movements seeking greater involvement in decision-making. Rather than simply relying on their apparent legitimacy via bureaucratic authority and technical expertise, project authorities need to build public support if envisioned outcomes are to be realized. Using a social capital lens, this chapter examines a cancelled major public infrastructure project, analysing the strategies used by the government authority developing the project and the opposing social movement, as they both sought to engage public support. It contributes to the public management and public accounting literature by identifying specific strategies needing consideration by those proposing infrastructure projects as part of engagement with the public and of response to social movements, highlighting the importance of openness and civic engagement in how infrastructure projects are shaped and unfold. These dimensions are important to manage, and account for, in the building of infrastructure.

Pages: 13

In public sector organizations, strategies and management accounting are often developed with the ambition of providing a combination of long-term objectives and short-term evaluations. This combination is sometimes labelled Strategic Management Accounting (SMA). The purpose of this chapter is to enhance our knowledge about SMA in the public sector context. We do this through a qualitative study of the Swedish Public Employment Service, which in 2020 launched a new strategic direction to manage changes in the agency’s environment, along with a balance scorecard (BSC). The research question for this case was: How is the BSC used by a public sector agency as an SMA tool? Our results show that the agency’s operational managers and controllers use the BSC as an SMA tool to create active management and control, while at the same time being reactive with a short-term focus. We address these results in relation to an idea of flexibilization, more specifically the desire to become a flexible agency that can change and adapt to short-term changes.

Pages: 15

Machine learning (ML) algorithms have now entered public decision-making surrounded by enthusiasm, for the possible positive impact they may have on services and citizens. However, their introduction brings with it numerous problems that are left in the background or not even addressed. Academic contributions are growing, and often discuss general challenges, such as a lack of transparency, a lack of accountability and the issue of discrimination. However, the wickedness of public decision-making and specific public decision-making characteristics are not fully acknowledged in the literature, and the impacts of these characteristics are underexplored. With a focus on public decision-making and Llgorithms in the public sector, in this chapter, we provide a conceptual overview based on a narrative literature review. Specifically, the chapter first offers an overview of public sector decision-making characteristics. After describing our methodology, the study offers an overview of available studies focusing on decision-making with algorithms and decision-making about algorithms. Then, implications in light of specific public sector characteristics are discussed. The main implication is the amplification of existing challenges that exist with both public decision-making and ML algorithms. Finally, some conclusions are drawn.

Pages: 47

No chapter abstract available.

Pages: 15

The European Union (EU) budget is the result of a complex process of negotiation between different actors and perspectives and plays a key role in managing relationships across different levels of government. Given the extraordinary times we live in and the size of the current EU budget, it is even more critical to maximize its performance. In this context, it is thus crucial to understand how the EU sets its performance budget and how performance is conceptualized and measured to guide the delivery of public value. The current era places an increasing focus on the creation of public value and the pursuit of good interests, but how to define and measure them and how to allocate resources to them is challenging. The research was carried out by reviewing available documents concerning the EU budget and interviewing European Commission experts dealing with the EU budget process and reforms. The purpose of the chapter is to shed light on how the EU compiles its performance budget and whether and how this approach is suitable for enhancing the delivery of public value. It contributes to the underdeveloped streams of literature on performance budgeting at the EU level and on public value budgeting.

Pages: 13

The aim of this chapter is to present a set of reflections on public value (PV) creation, destruction and preservation during the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic. The chapter presents a series of lessons for public value theory and public management, insofar as the social transformations and disruptions of the pandemic prove instructive to reflection, and these include: considerations of a “global” public; the importance of civil society; the predominance of private interest; the politics of accounting; the surprising successes and failures during the pandemic; and the underlying PV problems worsened by the pandemic. The findings of the chapter are that what is “valuable”, and what is valued, must be revisited in light of the new experiences that publics have undergone during Covid-19.

Pages: 17

The chapter explores the use of performance measures relating to public health during the UK’s coronavirus crisis and reflects on potential future research. At the outset, the chapter gives a background to the UK experience and then explores the usefulness of deliberative democracy, agonistic pluralism and “agonistic deliberation” as potential theoretical lenses. Focusing upon politicians, professional experts and members of the public, the chapter considers the role of performance information/measures in helping make sense of the crisis and contributing to public debates. The chapter reveals the innovative presentation and use of public health information in the UK during the pandemic. Instrumental rationality was found between the government and the public, and some degree of communicative rationality between government and non-affiliated scientists, in a context of “agonistic deliberation”. A research remit relating to the three stakeholders and performance information on public health is put forward at the end of the chapter. During a crisis, the chapter argues, it is vital that multiple voices be heard in democratic debate.

Pages: 62

No chapter abstract available.

Pages: 13

Effective management control systems (MCSs) are crucial for addressing strategic risks and uncertainties faced by organizations. Whilst research suggests that public sector organizations (PSOs) are exposed to as much risk as private enterprises, there is insufficient theorization on how MCSs can account for risk in PSOs. This chapter reviews existing public sector research on risk and draws upon management control scholarship to propose a theoretical framework for examining the interplay between risk and control in PSOs.

Pages: 17

Since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, Australian higher education institutions have experienced many risks, some of which are likely to materially affect their financial sustainability. Since risk disclosure plays a pivotal role in effective risk management (Abdelrehim et al., 2017), we expect universities, like corporations, will provide stakeholders with useful disclosures about changes in their risk profile. In this chapter, we examine the financial position and risk disclosures of 37 public universities in their 2019 and 2020 Annual Reports to deepen our understanding of these institutions’ risk work. The chapter extends the analysis of university Annual Reports by Carnegie et al. (2021a; 2021b).

Pages: 14

Performance management (PM) and risk management (RM) represent two interconnected systems towards public value (PV) creation. The integration of RM within other managerial systems and PM is considered beneficial for the organization. Through multiple-case study, the chapter will attempt to inductively understand the conceptual integration between PV, performance and risk in public sector organization. In particular, the chapter will pose the following research question: What tools, processes and actors contribute to making PV an integrating mechanism between PM and RM?

Pages: 16

This chapter provides an assessment of the relevant literature and presents the new realities of risk management in the public sector with respect to the current and post-Covid-19 era challenges. It proposes an enterprise risk management (ERM) framework, enabling a holistic, comprehensive and consolidated approach to help address many emerging challenges of risk management in the public sector. The Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the growing importance of risk and crisis management in the contemporary public sector. The global pandemic has forced many governments to respond quickly to safeguard the health and livelihoods of their populations by relaxing budgeting and spending rules, fast-tracking decision-making, and removing bureaucratic obstacles that prevented public service managers’ capacity to act quickly. The Covid-19 pandemic has also fundamentally changed the risk landscape in the public sector as governments have taken direct roles in the management of economic and societal issues, including the need to address complex factors such as inequality, growth, health and well-being, sustainability and climate change. Finding new ways to manage the uncertainties associated with the pandemic has exposed the public sector to a new set of risks related to balancing health and economic imperatives, finding alternative service delivery methods, and placing greater reliance on digital technologies.

Pages: 47

No chapter abstract available.

Pages: 13

Accelerating evidence of climate change, combined with growing social and economic inequalities, underpin the United Nation’s (UN’s) development of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Despite a commitment from its 193 members to achieve these SDGs by 2030, in the seven years since the SDGs’ launch, progress has been slow. Reports on the readiness to measure progress on the SDGs from the Supreme Audit Institutions of 72 member states overwhelmingly express regret that states are yet to define goals, that data is missing or irrelevant, and that citizens lack voice in stakeholder processes. If progress is to be made, national commitments to transnational agreements, such as the SDGs, require cooperation and action from a diverse range of actors. Instead of traditional bureaucratic or market-based regulatory approaches, polycentric approaches to governance are needed to deal with complex multilevel problems, and develop innovation and monitoring at the domain (e.g. regional) and the global level. This chapter analyses features of the UN’s polycentric SDG governance and its monitoring structures, including High Level Political Fora and the attendant reports, and how nations are called to account for their commitments to achieve the SDGs. It highlights the challenges faced in a complex fragmented sustainability project where achievement requires interdependency, opportunities for learning and sufficient resources. These issues will continue to drive public sector responses towards SDG success in networks, especially in these challenging times.

Pages: 15

This chapter aims to bring together the literature on accountability and sustainability in the public sector. It focuses on the debates concerning uncertain and complex institutional environments and outlines a framework placing impression management at centre stage. This framework aims to stimulate future research to have a deeper and more critical understanding of the measures and actions implemented in moments of crisis and uncertainty, such as the one the world is living in because of the Covid-19 pandemic, by public institutions. The proposed model for sustainability-related impression management and accountability moves away from ethical individualism and focuses on the goal of the good for the community.

Pages: 17

Whilst the chapters in this book offer significant new understandings of public sector risk management from multiple perspectives, there are emergent themes regarding which this chapter presents further reflections and extensions. This chapter demonstrates the relationship between management control systems (MCSs) and risk management on a thematic basis, and then lays out a research agenda for each theme. It elaborates on these themes, intending to develop future public sector research agendas in the context of crises and uncertainties that will inevitably persist and recur. As this book demonstrates, the uncertainties and risks associated with a global pandemic such as Covid-19 highlight the importance of developing a robust understanding of the range of risks in the public sector. We argue that there is a need for a new framework for managing the risks to PSOs (and the goods and services they provide) associated with pandemics or other major crises, such as geopolitical tensions. This chapter employs an MCS orientation as the framework’s foundation. This offers the prospect of PSOs managing current and future risks and uncertainty, developing a resilient culture and capacity for innovation and employing new control tools and processes and tools to that end.