Several institutions are monitoring public sector performance in Lithuania, leading to a great variety of analytical frameworks and approaches employed across the country. Reacting to this challenge, the Lithuanian Government aims to create and implement a mechanism to consolidate and harmonise these efforts to promote analytical, evidence-based public management. This task is implemented in collaboration with the OECD, which has been developing a performance monitoring and assessment system (“Performance Toolkit”) to assess the efficiency, effectiveness and integrity of the Lithuanian public administration, evaluate the performance of individual public administration institutions, improve the quality of planning and management of public policies, and identify areas of improvement. The performance management reform should help ensure the efficient use of public funds and human resources and increase transparency and accountability in the country.
During the first project stage, PPMI supported these efforts by providing a baseline analysis of the current state of the performance monitoring system in Lithuania, as well as a preliminary analysis of its strengths and weaknesses vis-à-vis new public sector reform strategies and the desired outcomes. As such, PPMI experts contributed to developing a Diagnostic Report which identified the strengths and challenges of existing mechanisms, structures and data for monitoring and assessing public administration performance. The Report mapped the existing situation and concluded with recommendations on designing the desired systems and identifying risks to manage.
Currently PPMI contributes to the project by supporting the development of design and proposal of open government and citizen engagement indicators for inclusion in the Toolkit. The proposed indicators will be aligned with the major open government and citizen engagement reform priorities in the country and permit for benchmarking Lithuanian central government institutions (their practices, procedures, outputs/outcomes) in this field. Building on the international good practices proposed by the leading open government institutions, PPMI will compose around 15-20 indicators and validate them with the key stakeholders in the field.