Evaluating best practices has evoked much concern, appreciation and discomfort amongst scholars and practitioners alike. A simple idea backed by a passionate leadership, compelling demand and a committed executive may help toss a success story in some situations while it may not do so in others. Moreover, the word ‘best’ in itself possesses a hazy interpretative rationale which may differ in different perspectives of evaluators. Yet it is an undeniable fact that Administrative practices need to be evaluated and its impact upon people and their lives need to be assessed. Nevertheless, it needs a starting point which is safely offered by the evaluation of the so far rated ‘best’ practices without impinging upon the good and the failed ones which would reach GKC through its website open communication. Any evaluation of an administrative practice is a prelude to an accountable and transparent administration.

Lately,  public sector has transformed significantly but beyond those who study administrative processes this has gone unnoticed by most citizens. These processes have brought the ‘Three Rs’ of recognition, replication and research. Evaluation of best practices is all about disseminating ideas on small efforts which carry a culture of innovation and a desire for changing lives.

There are various titles to ‘administrative innovation’ such as ‘New Public Management’(Hoods and Jackson 1991), ‘Reinventing Government’(Osborne and Gaebler), ‘Administrative Reforms’ ( B.Guy Peters) to a ‘Global Management Revolution’ (Donald Kettl). It has taken to many terms for expressing service delivery systems such as an ‘entrepreneurial government’ , ‘accountable governance’, ‘public-private partnership’ and ‘participatory governance’. The bane of public administration research has been its focus upon macro level institutions at the cost of micro level initiatives and grassroot activism in service delivery systems which had the potential of changing systems of governance across the country.

The critiques of research in micro level experiments  are many. Scholars such as Lynn Jr (1996) and Overman Boyd (1994) have criticized it as a ‘hostage to best practices tradition’, with all its associated limitations of being unreliable, unstable and insufficiently analyzed as possible models. As Stanford Borins in Innovations in Governance (2008) a research publication of the Ash Institute of Democratic Governance at the Kennedy School of Government at the Harvard University suggests; there are three main critiques of ‘best practice research’ in governance,

1. It rarely attempts to verify self-reported claims,
2. Organizations lauded for best practices today may without warning fail tomorrow
3. Best practices research focuses solely upon the characteristics  of successful organizations rather than comparing the mediocre and the failing.

Borins (2008) and Kelman (2007) explain that in a statistical context the failed policies is referred to a dependent variable and in regression analysis this becomes indispensable while bringing out variations in research. Thus ‘best practice research’ by focusing only on the ‘best’ ignores the need for variations in evaluating organizational performance.

However, research studies undertaken by institutions of governance across the world have tried to overcome this handicap of ‘best practice research’. The Ford Foundation funding has helped besides the Kennedy School of Government many other institutions in China, Brazil, Chile, East Africa, Mexico, Peru, the Philippines and South Africa. Its anchoring at the Ash Institute under the group called Global Innovators Network has emerged to help administrators share their experiences and concerns.

Governance Knowledge Centre rises to the challenge of sharing  knowledge and information contained in micro-level experiments of ‘innovations which rose to become best practices’ and also those which ‘were initiated as innovations but could not become best practices’. This research aspires to bring in a more comparative assessment of policies and programmes but may take some more time to produce a broad based learning framework. This task is dependent upon a fairly large number of evaluated practices under GKC, covering quite different terrains of implementation and organizational cultures along with other dependent variables which may be discovered alongside the main research.

References:

1. Osborne,David., Ted Gaebler 1992 Reinventing the Government, How the Entrepreneurial Spirit is Transforming the Public Sector,Addison-Wesley Publishing Co.
2. Hoods and Jackson 1991 Administrative Argument,Dartmouth, U.K.
3. Borins, Stanford ed.(2008) Innovations in Government,Research, Recognition and Replication, Brookings, Washington D.C.
4. Kelman, Steven 2007 The Transformation of Government in a Decade Ahead, Washington:IBM Endowment for the Business of Government.
5. Peters,B.Guy and Jon Pierre eds 2001 Politicians, Bureaucrats and Administrative Reforms , Routledge.
6. Kettl, Donald, 2005 The Global Public Management Revolution 2nd. Ed. Brookings, p.1.
7. Hoods, Christopher, 1991 “A Public Management for All Seasons?” Public Administrtaion  69:3-19.
8. Lynn, Lawrence 1996 Public Management as Art,Science and Profession, Chatham,N.J.Chatham House.
9. Overman, E.Sam, and Kathy  Boyd 1994 “ Best Practice Research and Post Bureaucratic Reform” Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory,4,no.1:67-83.