Book Review: State Governance by Targets: Bureaucratic Accountability, Performance Gaps, and Government Behaviors

Performance management has been a salient feature of public-sector reforms around the globe since the 1980s. In the past two decades, the literature on the content, rationale, challenges, and consequences of these reforms as implemented both in the West and in the East has grown rapidly. Studies show that one feature these reforms share is the use of preestablished, often specific and quantified, goals and targets to motivate public officials to achieve intended results. That being the case, one important angle to investigate when studying the so-called “governanceby-targets” regimes (Bevan and Hood, 2006) is how performance targets and goals are established and adjusted over time. In turn, this leads to questions of how the attributes of performance goals, targets, and indicators affect the behavior of public officials.