ABSTRACT
When politicians win elections in democratic systems and come into government, we expect them to bring with them new policies (on which they may have campaigned) and, especially as time goes on, to set about developing new policies in areas that had not featured in the elections. These policies may be informed by strategic thinking, and they may be turned into strategic plans and programmes set up under strategic plans. But whether the policies are strategic or not, politicians will want to know that the policies that they have decided on and expressed in legislation are being carried out. They will have allocated public money for their policies, and they will want to know that spending the money on the policies is achieving the results they wanted. These are key questions for politicians and are central to the process of monitoring. In other words, monitoring is about control. It is carried out over time during the implementation phase, which might, for example, be set at five years for many strategic plans. The need for monitoring may be partly based on concerns about the desire or capability of public service organizations to make the changes required by policy. So, strategic leaders want to know what is actually happening – is the policy/strategic plan being implemented? Expressed more negatively, is the civil service or specific public service organization making sufficient progress in implementation, or is implementation failing or going too slow?
