Abstract

Recent years have seen a sharp increase in the number of policy professionals serving in the Israeli government. The sixth floor of the Prime Minister’s Office accommodates more than 30 employees working in policy units, crafting government strategies and providing professional analyses. New policy planning departments are being set up all across government following new incentives and regulations introduced by the Civil Service Commission. Since 2006, ministries have been presenting their annual performance plans and the requirement for outcome and output indicators was recently adopted by the Budget Department at the Ministry of Finance.

This chapter explores the current state of affairs on the Israeli government’s road to improving its performance. It presents the current policy structure of the PMO before delving into the actions taken across government between 2006 and 2012. Reforms were designed both to create an infrastructure for policy analysis and to establish routines for policy planning. However, it is unclear whether the Israeli government moved to a culture of performance management or created performance bureaucracy, as there is no systematic measurement of the reforms’ outcomes. The chapter sets two challenges that lie ahead: the need for greater incentives to use professional policy inputs and the necessity of professional training to keep policy units effective and influential.

Introduction

The Israeli public service was modelled after its British predecessor. But whereas Britain and several other OECD countries have been through several structural reforms (see, for example, the Ibbs Report [HMSO, 1998]), until recently, Israel paid little attention to the way its public service functioned. In the US, an executive order issued in the 1970s led to the appointment of Under Secretaries for Policy Planning and Evaluation in most federal departments. At the same time, in Britain, the first central Policy Unit was set up at 10 Downing Street by Prime Minister Edward Heath. Similar reforms intended to improve government capacity to deliver better outcomes have been instituted in several other OECD countries.

In Israel, there have been three major attempts to pursue structural reforms in government, all of them ending with marginal, incremental changes.