ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the New Zealand government’s “Major Projects Performance Reporting” (MPPR) – a high-level assessment of the government’s most complex high-value investments. By employing a discursive approach, we have sought to identify some of the underlying rationality principles in the New Zealand government major project management reporting. By and large, this reporting system reflects various governments in New Zealand’s long-term adherence to managerial and de-politicising approaches in the public sector. Through the development of narrative and proxies for numbers, performance reporting provides a level of transparency and visibility solving the government’s policy problem, but in a way that is simply reductive, performative, and of little use outside political reporting. Public sector project management reporting does not operate in some technical and managerial void, but is embedded in a deeper political context beyond the traditional project management iron triangle of time, cost, and quality. This chapter is based on an interpretivist analysis of documentary sources such as evaluation reports, government policy briefs/reports, and some grey literature.
