NPM, accounting information, and politicians: Forty years of joy and tears in the control of local government in The Netherlands

In the Netherlands, local government started to take NPM initiatives since the 1980s. This chapter focuses on how output and outcome budgets, and the performance information included, were introduced and valued by the members of the Municipal Council, i.e. the councillors. The task of the councillors, who are elected politicians, is to democratically steer and control the municipal organisation. An important objective of output budgets and performance information was to strengthen the council’s role as the principal in the democratic control process. The output budgets did help councillors to think and discuss more in terms of clients, results and transparency. In that sense they contributed to changing habits and culture in local government. It seems, however, that more and more local politicians gradually lost faith in the value of numbers and further technical improvements in the planning and control documents. Councillors still wanted ‘better’ information, but this didn’t have to be numerical information. The more recent findings presented in this chapter also indicate that councillors are not really that interested in ‘figures’; many of them prefer to discuss ‘policies’ and to hear about the needs and feelings of the citizens and stakeholders. They also have little enthusiasm for the tasks of monitoring and controlling the Executive on the basis of the information in planning and control documents. So, the research suggests that the council does not really act as the principal in the municipal organisation. And it certainly doesn’t in a homogeneous and univocal way.