**8. Summary**

The public sector is a diverse environment in which to work. Although there are some general conclusions that can be drawn, staff perform better or worse in different agencies for highly diverse reasons. The Anna Karenina principle applies: "all well-performing agencies are alike; there are so many preconditions for effective performance that every dysfunctional agency is dysfunctional in its own way"." To perform well, public officials need to be confident about the future - not to the point of smugness, but certainly to the point that they can see the relationship between their efforts and any eventual outcome. The institutional environment within which they are working shapes these expectations. If the rules are not credible, with little prospect of enforcement, if they expect policies to be contradicted or resources to flow unpredictably, then they cannot envision any relationship between their effort and public sector performance. Rationally, there is little point in working purposefully as the results are so uncertain.

This paper sets out an analytical framework that was used in designing a series of surveys of the views of public officials concerning their institutional environment and in analyzing the information that was generated. It describes how the survey results help to map the strengths and weaknesses of a public sector, and offers an approach for identifying potential pay-offs from reform interventions. Above all, the framework emphasizes the heterogeneity of incentives and institutional arrangements _within_ the public sector - and the need for policy makers to have information that moves beyond generalities and indicates what is most likely to work and where.

In building on the premise that public officials' actions - and hence the performance of their organizations - depend upon the institutional environment in which they find themselves, this framework avoids any simplistic anti-government positions, without attempting a defensive justification for poor performance. Although there is every reason to be concerned about poor performance and rent-seeking by some public officials, there are as many reasons to be impressed by the selflessness and determination of others working under conditions of extreme difficulty. This framework offers an approach for understanding both good and bad performance and for presenting the results to policy makers in a format that lead to more informed choices about reform interventions.

The methodology depended on use of indicators to measure both institutional environment and performance, but the measures need to be interpreted with caution. As in the design of _any_ performance indicators, it is important to ask: who wants the indicators, who uses them and why. The reliability and the usefulness of indicators depend on the credibility of the information on which they were built, on the accuracy and comprehensiveness of the data. Finally, indicators are not the ends, they are a means for decision makers to raise questions and highlight issues for further discussion and investigation in the light of local, country-specific knowledge. Indicators are not precise 59 Tolstoy's original words were that "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way". Gary Reid pointed out the relevance ofthe observation for public sector performance.

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