A comparison of contracting arrangements in Australia, Canada and New Zealand

Increasingly, governments are using contracts as a means of achieving accountability for public resources directed towards community organisations. This paper compares contractual arrangements between community organisations and governments in British Columbia, Queeensland, and New Zealand. The paper examines the extent to which these contracts are able to measure performance. These contracts are also examined with respect to the power relationships between government and community organisations. The paper concludes that performance measurement may rest on establishing an appropriate ``value'' framework, and that autonomy of community organisations from government may vary according to broader objectives within policy areas. Increasingly, governments across the world are using purchase of service contracts as a means of delivering public goods. Growth in service delivery contracts emerges from a belief that public services contracted to the private sector results in improved efficiency and effectiveness (Bingman, 1997) and a desire to achieve greater accountability for public funds directed to community organisations (Else et al., 1992; Hanly, 1995). This paper compares service agreements in Australia, Canada and New Zealand, as a way of examining the extent to which these ``contracts'' between government and community organisations overcome some of the theoretical obstacles associated with the contracting (for example, Ryan, 1995; Quiggin, 1996; Prager, 1997). Contracting community services The literature dealing with contracts between government and voluntary organisations often addresses two problems associated with contractual arrangements between these two parties. First, there are continual problems associated with developing appropriate performance measures which might provide an insight into the outcomes achieved by community organisations. In particular, evaluation of human services has tended to focus on process measures which relate to the mechanics of service delivery and can be defined more easily than service performance (Kettner and Martin, 1993). Performance measurement has tended to focus on relatively easy to define outputs such as the volume of service, to more complex end-products such as client impact and effectiveness (Kettner and Martin, 1993; Nolan and Grant, 1993), and has tended to be ``crude, unreliable, spurious and meaningless'' (Flynn et al., 1995,