Performance Management and Accountability of Welfare State Agencies: The Case of Norwegian Agencies of Hospital Management, Welfare Administration and Immigration

Norway has seen administrative reforms in welfare state administrations over the past decade. First, a new court-like central agency, was introduced in 2001 to handle complaints from immigrants and asylum seekers with extended autonomy from the ministry. Second, the Hospital reform of 2002 introduced state-owned health enterprises based on a specific law. Third, the traditional central agencies for pensions and labor and employment were merged into a new labor and welfare agency in 2005. Delegating responsibility from ministry to agency combined with management by objectives and results (MBO) was a core element all three reforms. What makes a comparison interesting is the reforms’ common attempt to strike a new balance between delegation and control, blending influences from NPM and post-NPM ideas.We will show how these three agency models are working in practice. Do MBO practices correspond with or contradict stated ideas about delegation and control? How have the three different agency forms affected formal and actual accountability relations?. How is the dynamic relationship between performance management and accountability working when we compare the three sectors? We will first argue that multiple accountability relations are needed to understand the how hybrid and ambiguous agency models works in practice. Second, we will argue that agency forms are important but that it is in practice difficult to live up to the formal organizational models. Political salience, professionalism as well as the acceptance of local variations in service delivery are important for understanding how the different accountability relations play out in practice. Theoretically we will argue for the need to go beyond the principal-agency model of hierarchical accountability to understand the complex pattern of accountability relations. Our data are taken from different sources includingpublic documents, interviews with central actors in the three sectors and data from MBO practices across Norwegian ministry-agency relations.