Best-Practice Cases on Performance Budgeting in German and Dutch Local Government

The aim of this chapter is to describe and analyze best practices on performance budgeting and reflect on their achievements. We selected Mannheim and München in Germany, as well as Eindhoven and Delft in the Netherlands as best practice cases in local government. Municipalities in both countries prepare performance budgets (PBs) and have quite some experience in the meantime, although the Dutch municipalities started about ten years earlier than the German ones. While the Dutch practice of PB is rather homogeneous across the country as a consequence of being a decentralized unitary nation, due to federal variation the German practice is far more diversified between the states. The municipal PBs in the two countries show some commonalities but also rather striking divergences. German PBs are by far much more detailed which is also a result of a more fragmented budget structure. The much higher volume of them in page count (as the two cases demonstrate) is not primarily the result of the size of the city, but above all the result of the great variety of products and of provided performance information. It is debatable if the advantages of detailedness are outweighing the complexity of such voluminous budgets. Apart from that, there are some more differences: The budgetary foresight of the German PBs is lower than in the Netherlands. Further, contrasted to Dutch PBs, German PBs don’t include a collection of mandatory indicators and they do not inform about benchmarking results