Targets and performance indicators have become an increasingly important component of governance and public sector management across OECD countries. Mainstream views depict them as management tools, designed to improve the performance of public services through their ‘disciplining’ function. Yet targets and indicators also have a symbolic function: they can be adopted to signal commitment to a range of political or organizational goals and can be used in a variety of public contexts, from the mass media to political campaigning. This dual function implies that the adoption and implementation of targets can create tensions between more technocratically defined performance goals and populist narratives about policy problems. This paper explores the ways in which the adoption of targets has brought these tensions to the fore, examining two sectors: immigration and climate change. It focuses on the period 2000-2010, when the UK government rolled out a series of targets and PIs.
