Advancing
Performance Measurement and Management (PMM) in the Justice Sector
Who else is doing PMM
where? How is it working out for them? Answering these two questions will
advance performance measurement and management initiatives more than any effort
to date.
For many years,
I’ve been in the business of convincing courts and other justice institutions
to develop political will and capacity (OK, mostly just trying) to measure and manage their performance in an effective, accountable,
and transparent manner. I used to think that widespread buy-in by the justice
sector surely would be seen by the time of the development of well-conceived models
beginning with the Trial Court Performance
Standards in the late 1980s and early 1990s, to the CourtTools ten years ago, to the Global
Measures of Court Performance in the last few years. But buy-in for PMM certainly has not been overwhelming. Instead,
at best, it has been a slow slog for advocates of PMM.
Who Else is Doing
PMM Where?
In a recent
article in the William & Mary Policy
Review (Volume 7, Number 1), I suggest a way of speeding up this slog. (The
article should be available on the Journal’s website and on HeinOnline
shortly.) The PMM that is taking place today in justice systems throughout the
world, relatively limited that it may be, needs to be documented and made
visible and known to be used, I wrote. That is, knowledge production should be accompanied
by knowledge transfer. Unfortunately, this is not taking place at an effective
speed and extent, largely because the institutions and countries actually
engaged in PMM at the local levels understandably are not much in the business
of disseminating and promoting their PMM beyond their jurisdictions and borders.
Unlike research firms, universities, justice-related organizations, and donors,
they lack incentives to promote their work.
Over the last
several months, for example, I only learned through personal contacts with the
principals that the Victoria courts in Australia had adopted the Global Measures of Court Performance and
that High Court in Lahore, Pakistan, currently
is including seven of the eleven measures of the Global Measures into its new case management system. I’m trying to follow-up
on the latter as I write this post. This type of word-of-mouth, hit-or-miss, anecdotal
transfer of knowledge will not accomplish the trick of PMM knowledge transfer.
To address the
problem, my colleagues and I at the Institute for the Theory and Practice of
International Relations at the College of William & Mary last year launched
the Justice Measurement Visibility (JMV) Project, a project that aims to
identify successful PMM in throughout the world focused on Global Measures of Court Performance (which is part of the International
Framework for Court Excellence developed by the International
Consortium for Court Excellence). For those interested in adopting or adapting
the Global Measures, we hope the
project will answer the inevitable question for which today, unfortunately, we have
only an unsatisfactory answer, “Who else doing this today?”
How Is It Working Out for Them?
Working with the Courts and Tribunal Academy
of Victoria University in Australia in February and March this year, I ran into
unexpected headwinds of resistance to PMM, mostly coming from judges. In several venues, I presented the idea of PMM
in a way that I was convinced at the time would receive enthusiastic support. I
tried with moderate success at best to address confounding questions and
counter a few verbal bullets point-by-point. For example, I responded to the criticism
that the very idea of public accountability for court performance and
transparency is antithetical to the principles of judicial independence and
separation of powers by arguing that public accountability driven by a system
of performance measurement and management can and will strengthen, not weaken, judicial
independence and the institutional integrity of courts and judicial
independence.
Reflecting on the experience with these presentations,
I had an epiphany of sorts, the sudden and striking realization that advocates
of PMM, including me, were not practicing what we preach, namely that we should
measure results that matter, and count what counts. Shouldn’t we be looking at the
results of PMM itself in the same way? Yes, I realized we were failing to
address not only the question, “Who is doing PMM where?” but also the more
important follow-up second question, “How Is It Working Out for Them?”
How could I have missed this? Would not
resistance to PMM dissolve and the naysayers silenced if we could only answer
these two questions clearly and succinctly? If we could say, for example, that yes,
two-thirds of the justice institutions and justice systems using PMM throughout
the world have improved their performance. Moreover, three of them have very
much in common with that of the questioner.
A new ambitious project, will be joined with
the JMV Project at William & Mary, will address this second question. The project,
which does not yet have a name, is in the proof-of-concept stages. I will
describe progress in future posts here. Comments would be welcomed.
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