Improving public governance quality in regional state programs

High quality of public governance is an important factor for ensuring sustainable social and economic development, improving public well-being, minimizing losses in economic crisis time. Despite the lack of the systemic program for raising governance quality at the federal level in Russia, state programs in this area are being implemented in several Russian regions. Therefore, the review of regional practices in developing state programs aimed at improving the quality of public administration seems relevant for both subnational and federal levels of governance. The objective of this paper is to provide a systematic review of the approaches to improving governance quality implemented in the regional programs. The paper substantiates a novel approach to the key criteria of governance quality based on the core public administration paradigms, presents a systematic analysis of the regional approaches to implementing regional state programs aimed at enhancing the quality of public administration, and proposes recommendations for further development of these programs. The methods used in the paper include general scientific methods, literature review, and comparative analysis of 24 approved regional state programs aimed at improving governance quality. The results of the review of international and domestic literature on defining and evaluating quality of public governance presented in the paper formulate three core criteria measuring public governance quality: justification of public interference, effectiveness and efficiency of public administration. The analysis of regional state programs presented suggests that currently these criteria are only partially accounted for at the subnational level. The article demonstrates that none of the programs analyzed includes efficiency indicators measuring value for money in the public administration. For some areas of public administration, outcome-level indicators are lacking; for some areas, state programs do not include any indicators characterizing whether public administration interference is justified and impartial. The prospects of this paper are related to further improvement of regional programs and better orientation at the key criteria of public governance quality. The prospective areas for further research include the analysis of implementation of governance quality criteria in strategic and program documents at the federal level and comparative international research of approaches to the evaluation of the governance quality.