Professor Prajapati Trivedi

The central challenge to creating effective governments worldwide is the lack of a universal standard for defining and measuring "effectiveness." Currently, a government's effectiveness is subjective—like beauty, it lies in the eye of the beholder. The same government department can be viewed as good, bad, or ugly by different people, all looking at the same information.

This contrasts sharply with the private sector. When a company reports a profit of $300 million, that number is widely accepted. This isn't because people trust the private sector more, but because the figure is calculated using Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP). An external auditor then verifies that the financial statements comply with GAAP before they are made public.

Until recently, there was no equivalent to GAAP for the public sector. However, this changed in 2023. At a meeting of 65 Commonwealth countries, a new framework called the Generally Accepted Performance Principles (GAPP) was adopted. By following these principles, governments can now produce a "bottom line" for their departments that everyone can agree on.

Until GAPP is more widely adopted, managing the public sector will remain a challenge. We will continue to manage by focusing on controlling processes instead of measuring results.