Authors:
- Focuses on a "blind spot" in budgeting literature, analyzing how the rigidity of budget processes in the public sector inhibit the collaboration and agility needed in responding to complex non-routine problems
- Illuminates contending understandings of the nature of budget control and offers practical recommendations to policy makers on how to reconfigure centralized budget control for greater flexibility
- Offers a number of genuinely novel contributions to analyzing public management structures and practices, such as a taxonomy of budget control properties that unpacks the mechanisms inhibiting flexibility as well as an application of responsive regulatory approaches to budget control
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Table of contents (7 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
About this book
The authors identify public budgeting practices that inhibit responses to complex problems and examine how rule modification can lead to expanded budget flexibility. Through a nuanced understanding of the factors underlying conventional budget control, the authors use budget reforms in Australia to show the limits of rule modification and propose "rule variability" as a better means of recalibrating central control and situational flexibility.
Here, policy makers and public management academics will find a source that surveys emerging ways of reconciling control and flexibility in the public sector.iv>
Reviews
“The execution and management of budgets and public resources are among the most important but least understood aspects of public administration. This new assessment of public budgeting constitutes a path breaking framework to illuminate the trade-offs and consequences of various forms of budget flexibility for public accountability and efficiency. At a time of persistent austerity sweeping over fiscal systems throughout the world, such a framework is vital to help nations adjust to new rules and limits on budgetary resources imposed by publics, markets and multinational institutions.” (Professor Paul L. Posner, Director of the Centers on the Public Service, George Mason University, USA; Past President, American Society for Public Administration; author of The Politics of Unfunded Mandates)
“This book breaks new ground in the theory and practice of flexible resourcing in the public sector. It offers a novel application of responsive regulatory approaches to the inner workings of government, and will undoubtedly influence the development of public management frameworks. Di Francesco and Alford take a fresh look at the costly ways entrenched budget rules exact control, and show how, if applied very differently, the same rules can deliver regulators with greater precision and service providers with expanded potentiality.” (Professor Gary Banks, Dean of the Australia and New Zealand School of Government; Chair of the Regulatory Policy Committee of the OECD; formerly Chairman of the Australian Productivity Commission)
Authors and Affiliations
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University of New South Wales (UNSW), The Australia and New Zealand School of Government, Sydney,, Australia
Michael Di Francesco
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University of Melbourne, The Australia and New Zealand School of Government, Melbourne, Australia
John Alford
About the authors
Michael Di Francesco is an Associate Professor and Case Program Director at the Australia and New Zealand School of Government, and the School of Social Sciences, University of New South Wales (UNSW), Australia. He has held academic appointments at the Universities of Sydney and Melbourne, and Victoria University of Wellington, and expert advisory roles at the NSW Treasury, International Monetary Fund and World Bank.
John Alford is Professor at the Australia and New Zealand School of Government and the Melbourne Business School, University of Melbourne, Australia. He is an international authority in the areas of public value and client-organization relationships. His most recent Palgrave publication is (with Janine O’Flynn) Rethinking Public Service Delivery (2012), winner of the 2013 Academy of Management (Public/Non-Profit Division) Best Book Award.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Balancing Control and Flexibility in Public Budgeting
Book Subtitle: A New Role for Rule Variability
Authors: Michael Di Francesco, John Alford
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-0341-7
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Singapore
eBook Packages: Economics and Finance, Economics and Finance (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016
Hardcover ISBN: 978-981-10-0340-0Published: 24 May 2016
Softcover ISBN: 978-981-10-9137-7Published: 27 May 2018
eBook ISBN: 978-981-10-0341-7Published: 12 May 2016
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XV, 101
Number of Illustrations: 1 b/w illustrations
Topics: Public Finance, Financial Accounting, Public Administration