Practice Area: Public Management

Women's group Governments need to know if their services, programs, and projects are performing as intended, achieving their stated goals, and doing so in the most efficient and effective manner. To do this leaders need the skills and the tools to effectively manage resources and measure results. Without the right tools, government officials are not able to make the fully informed decisions about policy, resource allocation, or day-to-day management that would maximize their ability to provide better government services. We work to strengthen public management skill in a number of areas including Performance Management and Asset Management.

Performance Management: Information is the lifeblood of good public policy. Governments – local, regional, and national—need to know if their services, programs, and projects are performing as intended, achieving their stated goals, and doing so in the most efficient and effective manner. Without good performance information, government officials are not able to make the fully informed decisions about policy, resource allocation, or day-to-day management that would maximize their ability to provide better government services. Similarly, citizens can use objective information on government performance to encourage government to be responsive to their needs. Finally, donors need information to understand if the projects they support are having an impact as intended. Unfortunately, in many places and on many projects, monitoring and evaluation is too often an afterthought.

The Urban Institute believes that the regular development and measurement of indicators, the collection of program data, and the evaluation of services, programs and projects leads to improved performance of public agency programs, organizations, or individuals through improved decision/policy making, resource allocation, and service delivery.

Performance management and evaluation as practiced by UI is not about developing a standardized set of indicators or simply collecting data. Drawing on experience from around the globe and a variety of flexible, innovative techniques, UI works with partners to incorporate appropriate monitoring and evaluation techniques into management systems early on so that results can be utilized by decision makers to change course. UI assists a wide range of clients.
Asset Management: Governments are the largest owners of real property in the world, holding vast property portfolios that include office buildings, industrial properties, vacant land, and real estate used for delivering services to citizens. Public real property assets account for a largest portion of public wealth of both developed and developing countries. Yet, property assets typically remain “hidden treasure”: mismanaged, underutilized, and often in dire need of maintenance and repair. Typical problems include: lack of explicit policies regarding public property; lack of professional expertise within government to recognize and address complex asset management issues; lack of complete and reliable inventory records; legal disputes over many properties; extremely fragmented and inefficient administration of property portfolios, and bad financial management of the assets. Too often there are huge deferred maintenance and repair costs associated with public property everywhere, while most governments do not have resources for investing in property maintenance. This leads to loss of public wealth concentrated in governmental real property and historically, public asset management has suffered from a lack of transparency and conflict of interests.

Our approach is based on knowledge of international best practices in public asset management and an ability to transfer this experience and make it useful to other governments. We constantly monitor new developments in this area, and have become an internationally recognized institution capable of transferring knowledge and principles of good asset management to governments of all levels.