Utilization in public organizations: a case study of dawuro zone finance and economic development department
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- 2.5.2.2. The level Analysis
- 2.5.3. Traditional Budget Theory
| 2.5.2. The Outcome Budgeting Implementing outcome budgeting involves two major decisions (1) the selection of a basic approach, and (2) the selection of a unit of analysis. 2.5.2.1. The selection of a basic approach David Osborne and Ted Gaebler (1992) identify two basic approaches to outcome budgeting a) budgeting system that link specific outcomes to the budget process and (b) budgeting systems that purchase, or allocate specific resources for the accomplishment of specific outcomes. 2.5.2.2. The level Analysis With the selection of a level of analysis, it is determined at what level outcome budgeting will take place. Theoretically, outcome budgeting can accurate the programmer/service level, the agency/organizational level, the state or community level or any combination thereof (martin, 1997). The program/service level takes the form of linking outcomes to program/service level budgets or through the actual purchase of specific levels of program or service out come. 2.5.3. Traditional Budget Theory In the traditional budget theory public budgeting has been studied from three, usually divergent perspectives economics, management, and political science (Caiden, 1990). Studies rooted in economics tend to focus on the nature of public goods and the allocative efficiency of the mix of goods and services provided by government. Various decision rules and allocation processes are examined for their relative utilities in this regard. Recent efforts have sought to construct models of public sector decision making using concepts from micro 32 economics. Political scientists naturally highlight the political dimensions of the resource allocation process, and the budget’s role in the policy making process. In brief summary, incrementalism holds that budgets change only marginally from year to year, and major reallocations can be costly and should be avoided in light of the state of knowledge regarding public sector policy issues the resource allocation process is a fragmented, bottom-up process characterized by deference to substantive expertise and previous allocations. The organization based approach to the development of budget theory focuses on how the nature of the public organization affects the resource allocation process and how the nature of the resource allocation process affects the operations of the public organization. The public organization is as inescapable on the local level as it is problematic at the federal level, even if it is only weakly coupled on the resource allocation process. This is why practitioners in public organizations experience the budgetary process as the internal resource allocation system of their organizations, rather than as a purely political process. The prescriptions written from the management orientation are only occasionally based on descriptive or explanatory studies associated with any of the three perspectives. The management prospective is the one most clearly associated with public administration. Budget is approached as at a technical process, and public administrators are cast as technicians apart from the organizations in which they work. Theoreticians are able to avoid value issues through this separation, but the development of theory is constrained by the question that has dogged the field from its beginning technical efficiency for what end 33 One of the reasons that budget theory prescriptions have been divorced from budget theory descriptions is that most of the latter have been based on studies of the federal budget process, and adoption of the former has been more widespread at the state and local level. The substance of the dominant incrementalists description of the national budget process obviously limits the relevancy of management tools, but any descriptive theory of budgeting derived from analysis of the federal process will be of limited relevance to the state and local level.(Caiden,1990). However, state and local budget processes differ widely (Hackbart and Carson, and, hence, those areas appear to be less promising ones for the development of a single theory of public budgeting than the national budget process. The grandness of the theory derived from a focus on the federal government, however, is ultimately dimmed by its limited applicability to other levels. The conceptual fragmentation that characterizes budget theory reflects the multidimensional nature of the subject (Caiden Nb , the variety of approaches brought to bear on it and the fragmented structure of the field of the public administration in general. The management prospective on budget theory that public administration calls its own fails to address the allocative efficiency concerns of the economist, the related political issue of distributional equity, or the challenge to the relevancy of analysis posed by the incrementalist model. Practitioners are left with an impressive array of tools for action but no realistic guides to action. Bailey (1968) contends that instrumental theory-that is, guides to action in specific situations such as those that the management prospective on public budgeting seeks to 34 develop-should be based on normative and descriptive/explanatory studies of the particular phenomena under consideration. However, in the absence of the latter, the management school theorists, including those focusing on executive budget, tend to ascribe normative status to instrumental theories (Rubin, 2000). According to Bailey (1968), normative theory should seek to prescribe future states by identifying the values that should under gird administrative action. These value issues are those that public administration avoids by focusing on techniques rather than on the demands of the environments and the nature of the organizations in which they are employed-that is, on the context of public management. The fact that budget reforms have been widely adopted by state and local governments (Rubin, 2000) maybe quite beside the crucial point do to help and what do those help one do From the prospective of the practicing public administrator, resources allocation processes serve to create and continuously recreate the public organization. The appropriateness of the goals and technologies is always in question, due to differences in political values and the general lack of cause and effect knowledge regarding many public issues. These goals and technologies are manifested in resource allocation schemes the budget process can potentially change organizational goals, enable new technologies that have resource allocation implementations, and legitimize alternative organizational arrangements. The nature of this process and the basis on which these decisions are made constitute the basic stuff of public management, describe the environment of the practicing administrator, and delineate the theoretical turf of public administration. Few studies have approached budgeting from this prospective. 35 The most fully developed model is provided by Miller (1991) in this theory of government financial management. Miller builds an interpretive theory of financial management, in which the financial manager must deal with the ambiguity and uncertainty precipitated by the social constriction of an organizational reality by a variety of actors manifesting a range of perspectives and interpretations of organizational mechanisms, processes, and other phenomena, such as the budget process. For miller, traditional financial management theory is based on the assumption that there is considerable consensus about organization goals and technologies in public organizations, and this may not hold for governmental organizations. In this scenario, budget managers manipulate symbols and produce rituals centered on the common element of resource constraints. These serve to bridge the range of alternative visions of the organizations enterprise made possible by the absence of the widespread nation of making a profit Miller (1991). In order to get in-depth understanding of differences and underlying principles of each of the aforementioned public budget theories, summary of available literature on each of the theories is presented below. Download 0.82 Mb. Share with your friends:
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