In our everyday lives evaluation has many faces, and as a result of the impact of the New Public Management (NPM) movement, many students of public administration and administrators in the Japanese public sector have confused evaluation with measurement, rating, valuing, audit, inspection, appraisal and assessment. But in its essence, evaluation is data-gathering, data-analysis activities using scientific methods and tools of administrative skills. Taking a short historical perspective, this article focuses on this confusion, and considers what the ‘evaluation’ is.

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This paper is about NPM (New Public Management), which is a doctrine of administrative reform of public sector management especially in Western countries. NPM derived from Thatcherism in England, Reaganomics in the United States and Rogernomics in New Zealand. In Japan, NPM is known as the theory of policy evaluation to public administrators.
One of the aims of this discussion is to ascertain to what degree NPM influences evaluation in Japan. After that, we will discuss about the new phase which is called plural control. These are new types of problems with developing NPM in Japan.

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New Public Management is a “loose term” and vaguely defined. Despite the vagueness, I attempt to gauge the impact of New Public Management has had on Japan's Official Development Assistance (ODA) Evaluation with a focus on Performance Measurement, which is one of the key features of NPM.
In Japan's evaluation of ODA, the impact has not been significant. An indicator which is an essential element of Performance Measurement has been poorly introduced in Japan's ODA projects. Furthermore, monitoring has not progressed so far in the Evaluation system in Japan.
Moreover, it remains in doubt whether Performance Measurement is truly a feature of a New Public Management. Some tools to control a public organization by its objective have already existed since 1960's. It is time to escape the spell of NPM as a “loose term” and discuss a new management system.

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The purpose of this paper is to identify the strategies of reform that effectively gave control over the education policy community of outsiders and to clarify the features of the institutionalization process of the evaluation system in Japan after the 1990s by adopting the principal-agent theory and the policy community theory. A major characteristic of the reform process was that this reform was driven by outsiders of the education policy community not by an insider such as the Central Council for Education or the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. The features of the evaluation system are congruent with advanced NPM governance reform in an educational area, and contributed to the cost reductions in the public service. The new reformers were the organizations under the immediate control of the Prime Minister that is the National Commission on Educational Reform and the Council for the Promotion of Regulatory Reform. These organizations used the evaluation system to control the education policy community from the outside. The background context to the reforms included a financial crisis and a supply side failure of the education system.

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The Incorporated Administrative Agency system, based on the idea of Executive Agency in UK, is regarded as a part of the New Public Management (NPM) movement. This system is designed to reform inefficiencies in activities and an absence of management clarity, and achieves some positive effects. There are, however, some negative effects if the NPM movement causes the combination of evaluation with conventional audit and survey, ex post facto regulation, politicized overall review and over-expectation of the evaluation. This paper shows it may be possible to overcome all the current difficulties of the evaluation and overall review in practice, although the Act on General Rules of Incorporated Administrative Agency, which has already been introduced to the Diet, is to be partially amended based on the Reorganization and Rationalization Plan for Incorporated Administrative Agency.

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While the flow of municipal mergers has calmed down, small-scale local governments are accelerating the introduction of performance measurement due to increased financial difficulties. The problem is whether these organizations can manage performance measurement well by making the best use of the tool. This paper analyses small-scale local government of around 20,000 people as the object of study and clarifies the current state. The paper finds that small-scale local government is being deceived by NPM-affected performance measurement. However, small-scale local governments can practice effective program evaluation by making the best use of the feature. In terms of future prospects, the paper sketches the figure of program evaluation in local government.

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Performance measurement and reporting, an important factor of New Public Management, is becoming widespread in Japan. This chapter discusses the challenges as well as the opportunities for increasing the value of performance management across multiple levels of administration and public-private relations about local government in Japan. These processes demand attention to be paid to coordination and cooperation. And these efforts create an overwhelmingly difficult and complex task.

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The purpose of this research is to theoretically review the National University Corporation Evaluation System and to identify factors impeding appropriateness and functional capability within the system design. As a result of the theoretical review, the evaluation system design was found to be vulnerable in terms of implementation. This is because the level of appropriateness for a purpose in the system design is dependent on functional capability whilst functional capability, however, is not necessarily ensured because this evaluation system consists of three theoretical evaluation mechanisms that reduce each other,s functional capabilities due to their trade-off relationships. The research concludes that the appropriateness for a purpose in the evaluation system design is not adequate.

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