Performance Budgeting across Government Levels in Russia*

The chapter reveals whether and how performance budgeting (PB) reform dialogue unfolds across government levels in Russia. The findings demonstrate that PB resulted in a complex regulation framework at the federal level. This framework resulted from both the aspiration to converge globally and a search for internal instrumentality in a centralized political environment (vertical of power). This, in turn, produced tensions for regional and local governments in absorbing central reform and seeking the instrumentality of PB for themselves. Overall, despite the rhetoric of public sector modernization dialogue, PB reform became a monologue of the federal authorities retaining the Soviet past and its central power.