2005 Fulbright Senior Scholar announced

Dr Paul Duignan has been awarded the Fulbright Senior Scholar Award for 2005.

This award recognises professional distinction and will see Dr Duignan based in Washington DC from November 2004 to February 2005.

His area of expertise is measuring the outcomes of government programmes, particularly in the health and social areas. He has been working with government agencies in Wellington helping them get smarter at outcomes measurement. The Fulbright award will allow him to study how the US government goes about measuring its public programme results.

"I want to find better ways of measuring outcomes which work in the real world in which government departments operate" said Dr Duignan.

"It's easy for the public or politicians to demand that government departments prove that what they're doing makes a difference."

He agrees that where that can be done then it should be done, but in some cases it's very difficult or expensive to absolutely prove that what a single department did produced a result.

"This is really tricky where a number of departments are working to solve the same problem together with many groups in the community. Who should get the credit for say, reducing unemployment, when it's a combined effort of all of the players in the economy combined with global economic trends?"

Comparing outcomes measurement to accountancy, Dr Duignan says, "the study of outcomes measurement is like accountancy before the 16th century, few people understood accounting theory, we didn't have trained accountants and we had no clear accounting rules and practices."

He has set himself the task of developing the underlying theory behind outcomes systems.

Dr Duignan believes that the managing for outcomes approach being adopted in New Zealand by Treasury, the State Services Commission and government departments is generally a balanced approach; although there is still much work to be done implementing it in individual departments.

After returning from Washington he will continue his part-time position as a Senior Research Fellow with the Centre for Social and Health Outcomes Research and Evaluation at Massey University in Auckland and his work for Parker Duignan Ltd in Wellington on outcomes measurement. He will be posting his findings from the Fulbright study tour on www.strategicevaluation.info.