Towards Policy-Driven Performance Reporting: The Case of Waterway Infrastructure

Infrastructure managers at public agencies experience increasing pressure to align maintenance operations with organizational policies. Their performance reporting is often weak for coping with future developments. Politicians require more control on maintenance expenditures. Budget cuts put many governments under pressure to answer for resource allocation decisions. Moreover, infrastructure stakeholders want to be informed on the fulfillment of their interests. They expect higher service standards and transparency from public agencies that manage infrastructure assets. The political and social pressure on public agencies requires a more objective, goal-directed and easily measurable performance reporting scheme that connects the policy and operational levels in public agencies. Few studies pay attention to the relation between the policy and operational sides of infrastructure management. The aim of this paper is to propose and discuss a four-layered performance reporting scheme to connect policy and operations in public agencies. Central to the discussion are the challenges in the design and application of the proposed scheme. The discussion is based on three case studies on the current performance reporting design in the waterway sector in the Netherlands. The results of the study include a list of key challenges in the design and application of the policy-driven performance reporting schemes.