A comparative analysis of the development of performance-based management systems in Dutch and Norwegian local government G. Jan van Helden a , Åge Johnsen b, * a Faculty of Economics, University of Groningen, 9700 AV Groningen, The Netherlands b School of Management, The University of Edinburgh, William Robertson Building, 50 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9JY, UK Received 5 January 2001; received in revised form 15 February 2001; accepted 25 September 2001 Abstract The purpose of this paper is to compare performance management in Dutch and Norwegian municipalities. The analysis of performance budgets and annual reports from nine municipalities from each country shows that performance management changed during the 1990s. Contingent factors such as fiscal stress, opportunity for change, organizational size (uncertainty), and characteristics of the policy fields (ambiguity) were analyzed to explain this pattern. The results indicated two important implications for public management and for contingency theory: the Nordic, incremental and con- sensual model may give substantial opportunity for change; and the conventional wisdom in organi- zational control requires further development regarding political control. © 2002 Information Age Publishing Inc. All rights reserved. Introduction This paper deals with the role of management accounting in public sector reforms. Such reforms are often denoted as New Public Management (NPM) in Europe (Hood, 1991; 1995). Comparable developments are known as reinventing government in North America. NPM reforms typically have evolved around six dimensions (Pollitt & Bouckaert, 2000): Privat- * Corresponding author. Tel.: +44-0131-650-8334; fax: +44-0131-650-8337. E-mail address: aage.johnsen@ed.ac.uk (Å. Johnsen). International Public Management Journal 5 (2002) 75–95 1096-7494/02/$ – see front matter © 2002 Information Age Publishing Inc. All rights reserved.