Public Sector Priority Setting Using Decision Support Tools* Australian Journal of Public Administration • 60(2):44–59, June 2001 © National Council of the Institute of Public Administration, Australia 2001. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK, and 350 Main Street, Malden 02148, USA. RESEARCH & EVALUATION Victoria Mabin Malcolm Menzies School of Business and Public Management Victoria Link Ltd Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand Graeme King Karen Joyce** Science Policy Unit Science Policy Unit Ministry of Agriculture Ministry of Agriculture Wellington, New Zealand Wellington, New Zealand The public sector is in transition in many countries, including New Zealand, and many government departments have been restructured so as to increase transparency and accountability in their decision-making by implementing fundamental changes to governance, accountability regimes and information systems. New frameworks are also needed for tasks such as priority setting, and this paper describes the framework developed to assist the then NZ Ministry of Agriculture (MAF) in setting priorities for the allocation of research funds. This comprised a participative process including a series of workshops using both GroupSystems software for electronic meeting support and Visual Interactive Sensitivity Analysis (VISA) software to facilitate a multi-criteria decision analysis. The public sector is in a period of transition in many countries. Many governments are proposing fundamental changes to the governance, information systems and regimes of accountability, accounting and auditing. Different patterns of change are being pursued in different countries. Changes in Australasia are aimed at increased efficiency and competition in the provision of pubic sector goods and services. Whilst some changes in Asia are aimed at improving democracy and efficiency, others are about streamlining government services. In OECD countries there appear to be mixed reasons for pursuing public sector administrative reforms. In several countries there have been significant changes to the traditional public administrative, accounting, auditing and accountability technologies (MGSM 1997). As the above extract suggests, there have been fundamental changes to governance, accountability regimes, and information systems in many countries, impacting greatly on the public sectors in those countries. New Zealand perhaps more than any other country, has undergone massive restructuring in its public sector. Latterly, the country has also switched to a Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) system for electing its parliament. This electoral change, which has been reported on elsewhere (Boston et al.1996, Levine and Roberts 1997) has been widely interpreted as an expression of dissatis- faction with the conduct of politicians and, by extension, of public policy. As one consequence of departmental restructuring, outcomes have been specified at a number of levels, most notably as Strategic Result Areas (SRAs) specified by the government, but also in strategic government documents such as ‘Path to 2010’, the govern- ment’s Coalition Agreement, Key Result Areas (KRAs) for Chief Executives and departmental goals. 1 At the same time, departments are all working within finite budgets, and it is very unlikely that these will ever be sufficient to deliver every desired strategic outcome. As a consequence, departments are increasingly finding it necessary to establish priorities among activities, both in terms of their relative contribution to outcomes and for the allocation of scarce resources. This development presents some difficulties, however. The