Why should we worry about how outcomes are produced?

Government, service providers and service users all want programs designed to assist vulnerable Australians to be successful: to achieve desired policy goals. There is also agreement that achieving desired policy goals is more likely when service providers are able to deliver high quality services. How then can governments be assured that service users are receiving high quality services? Assessing service quality requires information about outcomes, but it also requires information on processes (what the service provider does) and how these processes lead to desired outcomes. Where outcomes are co-produced, service providers need to understand what service users value and be prepared to trust their clients' expertise in their own lives because empirical research reveals that groups, such as children, who are seen as vulnerable, have the capacity to analyse their own situation and understand what sort of assistance will help them move forward. For its part, governments need to remove performance management or funding mechanisms that constrain agency capacity to assist service users achieve desired outcomes. I argue that governments will find it easier to do this if they adopt a different way of thinking about accountability that resolves the tension between governments' accountability and policy goals.