ABSTRACT
In the struggle to create better forms of public services it is important to remember that there will never be “perfect” models of service delivery. Nor will public services look exactly the same across time, place or sector, with public preferences and priorities shaped by their social, economic and geographic contexts. This chapter demonstrates the growing influence of benchmarking in public services and its bias towards top-down, market-oriented and Eurocentric indicators. It focuses on impressing readers the value of benchmarking despite these problems. The chapter outlines a proposed new model of public services performance evaluation that could be adopted in different sectors in different locations in ways that are more democratic and less commercial than the benchmarking systems currently in place. It also focuses on the water sector but the arguments that are relevant to other public services, all of which could develop progressive new forms of benchmarking with similar principles of universality and flexibility.
