20-Year History of Performance Measurement in the Local Public Sector: A Systematic Review

Although many recent studies have assessed performance in a particular field, the basic principles that should be followed for successful governance are in many cases different or, by contrast, exhibit very similar features. This paper fills the gap in this area and documents the basic knowledge and limits of new proposals for evaluating the performance of local institutions, thus creating, together with the published summaries of the factors affecting performance, the basic knowledge base for further effective direction and development of this area. According to the current trend in the understanding of performance, performance should be seen as a financial and comprehensive criterion that is easily understandable, objective, and comparable. By contrast, the fundamental limit of complex methods of performance evaluation has a low potential for its application in practice, which leads to the so-called encapsulation of science and unnecessary waste of researchers' efforts to implement their proposals.