Editorial: Impact through relevance

A primary aspiration of Public Money & Management (PMM) is impact through relevance. The journal seeks to combine contemporary original research with its application to situations and conditions that exist in a variety of public sector circumstances. PMM asks its contributors to pursue examples of good practice, sometimes best practice, or even bad practice, in order to assist the development of good governance based on high-quality research. We attempt to eschew academic jargon and actively seek to combine the work of practitioners and academics in themes, drawing lessons out of the comparative examples of wicked problems concerning policy-making and service delivery. Some themes evolve from new development articles, others reflect the pressing issues of concern. Out of the themes, we often obtain debate articles or full research articles that address the issues raised. As such, it is often instructive to look back at previous themes and issues and observe the development of public management practice and finance over a period of time.

One of our themes in Vol. 40 (No. 8, November 2020), addressed Developing civil servants and Lord Michael Bichard, PMM’s international editorial board chair, was guest editor. In many ways this theme was an update and drawing together of dynamics for reforms dating back before the Fulton Report, but it is an area that, until recently, had been increasingly neglected. It is something the journal is keen to explore in future practitioner-focused issues. In this issue, we include an article by Eduard Schmidt, which studies how ‘top civil servants play a central role in managing cutbacks’. Although not directly addressing the development of civil servants, Schmidt points to the requirements in their recruitment, training and continuing development that are needed to implement this often arduous task. The article ‘focuses on their values, as these provide direction to behaviour’ and suggests that ‘the relationship between values and cutback management strategies is less clear than previously understood’ with efficiency concerns leading to ‘targeted cuts, because top civil servants focused on organizational resilience and robustness are more inclined to use this strategy’.

Another theme from Vol. 40 (No. 7, October 2020), was on Governmental accounting and public financial management reforms in Latin America, guest edited by Mauricio Gómez-Villegas and Andreas Bergmann. In discussing a regional series of financial reforms, in this case in Latin America, the theme encouraged an understanding of professional (and policy) learning and development. The wider lessons of comparative work of this nature are brought home in this current issue where Nives Botica Redmayne, Fawzi Laswad and Dimu Ehalaiye investigate whether the application of international accounting standards increases the cost of auditing of the financial statements. In the case of New Zealand, they confirm the argument, frequently brought forward by practitioners, that audit costs increased with the application of international accounting standards, except for central government entities. The increase for local authorities and tertiary educational entities could be attributed to the revenue recognition standards, which offers some insights on how this issue could be addressed in practice. And again, there are clear overlapping lessons to be drawn from our theme in Vol. 39, No. 6, Innovations in public sector financial and management accounting—for better or worse? with guest editors Eugenio Caperchione, Sandra Cohen, Francesca Manes Rossi and Isabel Brusca.

Rebecca Taylor, Alison Fuller, Susan Halford, Kate Lyle and Ann Charlotte Teglborg’s article in this issue discusses how top-down models of innovation often fail to ‘address the entrenched problems of healthcare’ and that ‘staff innovate services on the ground when resources are scarce’ … ‘where employees—clinicians and practitioners—are driving innovation, they engage in a creative process to mobilize resources; appropriating and repurposing local funding, available space, delivery models and even the labour of staff at all levels’. There are some clear links across here to our themes on Co-production of public services and outcomes (Vol. 39, No. 4), with guest editors Tony Bovaird, Sophie Flemig, Elke Loeffler and Stephen P. Osborne, as well as some of the major points that came out of our theme on The development of ‘Lean’ (and associated techniques) in public, third and voluntary services (Vol. 38, No. 1) with guest editors Nicola Bateman, Zoe Radnor and Russ Glennon.

In this issue, Pedro J. Camões and Miguel Rodrigues explore the ‘determinants of continuity and change of municipal organizations designed for service delivery’. They focus on the ‘political and financial costs of termination’, and ask ‘what is behind a local government’s decision to terminate a municipal enterprise?’ In this, their article ‘contributes to the academic literature on the choice of institutional mechanisms for service delivery, particularly on “reverse contracting” which occurs when contracted services are taken back from former providers as a result of contracting challenges’. There are clear links here in terms of public sector managers’ behaviour when tasked with change, with the article by Alexander Kroll and Obed Pasha that ‘contributes to the literature on resistance to change in public organizations by studying how management mitigates employee cynicism toward reforms’. The case study and research is drawn from German local government, while Camões and Rodrigues’ research discusses Portuguese authorities, but the lessons to be drawn are widely applicable. They reflect the importance of two seemingly contradictory perspectives, the importance of understanding political, cultural, economic and historical context, but also attempting to draw wider lessons from local experience. A reading of these articles acknowledges this, especially if read alongside the themes of Vol. 40, No. 4, Strategic planning that works—evidence from the European public sector, with guest editors Bert George, Anne Drumaux, Paul Joyce and Francesco Longo, and Vol. 39, No. 5, Information sharing—easy to say, but harder to do well, with guest editors Rob Wilson, James Cornford, Sue Richardson, Sue Baines, J. Ramon Gil-Garcia, Stephen Curtis and Nicola Underdown.

This issue, therefore, continues to contribute to the global debate on reform and uses the work of practitioners and academics to bring together case studies and research to enable valuable lessons to be drawn on delivering well-managed public money and administrative reform.