by Alex Roldan
A few days before P-Noy’s government reached its first 100 days, survey firms, media organizations, civil societies and journalists were already racing to get the first cut of how the people view the performance of the new president.
Varied as they are, comparable to other trust rating surveys done in the past, in some way it gives us a general trend of how the people view the government’s performance. Others may not see the importance of this in nation building, but performance evaluation has been one of the essential tasks of people’s movements for reforms in government in the past two decades all over the world.
Evaluating government performance through perception surveys after the EDSA revolt was not very popular then. But the persistence of survey firms such as the Social Weather Station, which from time to time releases results of their studies to the media, caught the attention of the whole country, particularly during the crisis in Erap’s administration. I believe that that was the turning point. It immediately became an important decision making tool for civil societies, either to push for policy reforms or as a basis to call for mass mobilization against the government.
This peaked during the almost a decade rule of Arroyos. Everybody was into the fray. Different studies by many groups were made for the purpose of advocating social, political and economic reforms or to put it bluntly, warning the government to shape-up. Though it did not lead to the downfall of the Arroyo government, it laid the ground for regular perception surveys to determine how well the government was doing in the eyes of others.
But the real challenge now is how to maximize the benefits of this mechanism, if we call it that, so that it will not be just a simple matter of who is satisfied or not satisfied with the performance of government. This is the real challenge at the moment that is placed on the shoulders of both practitioners, media and academicians – to raise the bar of people’s understanding on how to evaluate government by proposing common indicators that can truly gauge the performance of government.
Just like in any performance evaluation of organizations, a clear set of indicators should be set thus avoiding and divergence in the conclusions. The call for “change” is ambiguous and I am afraid will only end up as a mere empty slogan used carelessly by people who don’t understand the parameters of what this word really means to governance. It would be like trying to measure the immeasurable.
What is lacking, I believe, is the conceptual model of evaluating government performance. Noticeably, studies are too dependent on subjective checklists that may tell the government about the people’s perception of their performance in a certain period, but does not point to which part of the performance should be addressed. I propose that, for example, if the priority concern at this point in time is to push the government to adopt a comprehensive reform, the practitioners and academicians should come-up with an integrated balanced scorecard with mission-aligned performance measures. Meaning the government should be asked to declare its development strategy. A sort of a “development map” that indicates their priorities, the resources and the management structure that they intend to use to create successful results, and the like. This will then become the basis for formulating the evaluation approach – which is far better than simply asking the people to give grade or rate the government performance based on vague terms.
I may be asking too much, but I believe that this is the way to go. Studies like this could help people understand fully what the real meaning of government is.#
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