Enhancing Performance Regimes to Enable Outcome-based Policy Analysis in Cross-boundary Settings : A Dynamic Performance Management Approach

Over the last two decades, the field of public administration has witnessed theoretical and practical changes that have innovated the relationships between public administration and performance management.

Dealing with the rising complexity of performance regimes in contemporary public administration requires that policy-makers and their organizations are able to face unpredictable problems impacting on a community’s quality of life. Complex policy issues – such as immigration, pandemics, societal aging, crime, unemployment, and financial crises  – cannot be easily solved by quick fixes that are focused only on a short-term and bounded vision of their causes. They rather require “robust” methods to support policy analysis and to affect sustainable community outcomes in cross-boundary settings.

As illustrated in this book, Dynamic Performance Management provides a methodological framework enabling policy-makers to outline the causal relationships among policy outcomes, performance drivers, and related strategic resources. Such a modeling approach helps stakeholders to broaden the investigated system boundaries so to balance short- and long-term performance under different result domains.

This approach blends performance management and System Dynamics modeling. Several examples and case studies are discussed to enable scholars and practitioners to appreciate the practical implications related to the use of such an approach.

Vincenzo Vignieri is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Law and Business Studies, University of Siena (Italy), where he teaches Business Administration. Formerly, he served as an Adjunct Professor in Business and Public Management at the Department of Political Sciences and International Relations, University of Palermo (Italy), where he taught Business Administration, Business Performance Analysis, and Performance Management in programs at master and doctoral level. He holds a Ph.D. in Public Management and Governance from the University of Palermo. During his Ph.D. studies, he spent a term at the University of Bergen (Norway) and the Radboud University of Nijmegen (Netherlands). He also has been visiting scholar at the University of Baltimore (USA).

Main research areas cover Business and Public Management with a priority focus on performance management and policy analysis in cross-boundary settings, public service co-production, urban and rural regeneration, local development, and open innovation. In these research fields, he uses the System Dynamics Methodology as a method enabling a better understanding of complex social systems behavior. In these domains, Vincenzo Vignieri has published several articles in academic and professional journals. He also has experience as a policy analyst for the Italian Ministry of Economy and Finance and the Italian Agency for Territorial Cohesion.