Performance Management (PM) as an Instrument of Coordination? Strategies of Quality Improvement in the Policy Field of Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) at Local Level of Government in France, Germany and Sweden

Performance management has expanded from policy evaluation movements in 1960s and 1970s (Wollmann 2004) to become a global trend with increasing pressure by a global educational governance (Ioannidou 2010) and in the ECEC field by the Barcelona Strategy (Navarro and Velasco 2016). As a way of improving the political steering of administrative action, performance management has been mainly promoted by New Public Management (NPM) yet has survived NPM and is today increasingly associated with integrated governance and coordination of government (Halligan 2007; Pollitt and al. 2007). While the assumption of a convergence trend of European local governments towards implementation of performance management has been refuted (Kuhlmann 2010), clear explanations about the institutional determinants for variation at local level of government are still desiderata. This paper links together two research steps at central and local levels of government. Why do local governments in France, Germany and Sweden choose different strategies for the implementation of performance management in the ECEC policy field? How to explain local variation within each country? The topology of Halligan and Bouckaert (2008) classifies France and Germany as ‘performance administration’ and Sweden as ‘management of performance’ models, but needs to be adapted to the ECEC policy field. The local performance context encompasses several determinants explaining variation in local PM implementation strategies. Whereas the steering mode of reforms is mainly bottom-up, locally steered and voluntary (Kuhlmann 2010), variation will be expected in terms of overall coordination and level of decision (Padovani and Scorsone 2009). Other explaining factors are suggested: local government ideology, actor constellation and local room for maneuver (Navarro and Velasco 2016). Finally, the ideal types of performance management implementation will be adapted to the local context of the ECEC policy field following the choice of different steering tools: e.g. planning, accountability, evaluation (Favoreu et al. 2015). To better grasp the institutional determinants for the design and implementation of a specific types of performance management, I compare two local governments in each country, following the Most Similar Different Outcomes (MSDO) approach. Beginning with France, I control for context dimensions, choosing two similar cities in regards to the sociodemographic configuration of the population and the ECEC field, budget pressure and administrative setting. The two cities vary in terms of political ideology and openness towards administrative reforms. Main sources of knowledge are expert interviews with local politicians and civil servants and analysis of official documents. From the interviews at central level, it seems clear that the narrow ‘human resource’ based concept of performance management should be broaden up to encompass the whole range of planning, monitoring, evaluation, inspection and quality management tools in order to be adapted into the ECEC policy field (Smith and Goddard 2009). Hence, I suggest that local actor constellation (‘programmatic actors’), political ideology (‘transparency and policy-orientation’) and openness towards administrative reforms explains the move from a performance administration (‘absence of tool’) to a performance governance (‘full range of tools’) model at the local level of government (Hassenteufel et al. 2010; Van de Walle et al. 2010).