Performance Budgeting: Linking Administrative Strategies to Budgetary Outcomes

This chapter examines how administrators use performance information in budget debates to influence legislative funding decisions. With a perspective of government information processing (GIP), the chapter describes that the performance information use is part of an administration’s overall strategic scheme that includes issue framing, rationale clarification, and narrative development in the debates. The empirical results from analysing Hong Kong environmental funding decisions suggest that the adoption of performance-based strategies influence resource allocations, while this effectiveness can be interacted with or even replaced by other administrative strategies. Performance information is more frequently used by administrators in legislative debates to justify continual funding injection. Project performance is a key consideration for funding of pilot experimental projects. This chapter contributes to performance management by specifying an important role of administrators in performance budgeting from a new theoretical perspective of GIP.