Public Performance & Management Review

A Symposium Organized by Public Performance & Management Review (PPMR) - Managing for Equitable Performance: Opening the Black Box, Governing New Technologies, and Sustaining Commitment in Contested Times

Social equity has long been called the “fourth pillar” of public administration. In performance measurement and management, however, it has often been the fourth “E”: acknowledged but seldom operationalized, and subordinated to efficiency, effectiveness, and economy. Over the past decade, governments have experimented with disaggregated data, equity indicators and dashboards, racial equity and gender budgeting, equity scoring of capital projects, and equity goals in strategic plans. Research shows that the effects of performance regimes on equity depend on system design, who defines and interprets indicators, and the political and institutional context.

Three developments make this a timely moment for inquiry. First, we know little about how equity indicators enter managerial conversations or change staffing, discretion, resources, and service design. Progress is more visible in access and procedure than in outcomes, and the path from measurement to equitable results remains largely untested. Second, AI and algorithms now shape eligibility, risk scoring, and performance monitoring. The Dutch childcare benefits scandal and Australia’s Robodebt scheme show how technology can scale harm and resist correction, even as it may reduce administrative burden and expose hidden disparities. Third, the political ground has shifted. In the United States, federal equity action plans and offices were dismantled by executive order in 2025, and some states have restricted equity programs. Elsewhere, equity and wellbeing frameworks have been rolled back, relabeled, or defended. As equity becomes a polarized term, managers may pursue distributional goals as access, opportunity, fairness, customer experience, or burden reduction.

Building on PPMR’s previous conversations, this symposium focuses on managing for equitable performance (MFEP). We mean deliberate efforts to bring distributional questions—who benefits, who bears burdens, who is counted, and who is left out—into goal setting, measurement, analysis, budgeting, decisions, implementation, learning, and accountability. Equity spans race and ethnicity, gender, income, disability, geography, generation, and their intersections, as well as access, procedural fairness, quality, and outcomes. We ask how, when, for whom, and how durably MFEP works, and how it can be designed, governed, and sustained in “uncharted territory.”
Closing the research–practice gap is central. The symposium will bring scholars together with performance managers, budget and finance officers, equity and data officers, auditors, and technology leaders to test ideas against practice. We especially welcome scholar–practitioner co-authorship, research–practice partnerships, and actionable design principles for public organizations.

We encourage international and comparative participation. MFEP takes shape under different legal, political, and administrative arrangements—from equality duties and gender budgeting laws to local racial equity budgeting and algorithmic targeting of social programs in the Global South. These differences offer theoretical and practical insight.

Guiding Themes and Questions
We welcome conceptual and empirical work using quantitative, qualitative, experimental, computational, or mixed methods on these themes:

1. Inside the Black Box: How Equity Information Shapes Managerial Decisions
- How do equity indicators and disaggregated data enter performance reviews, “Stat” meetings, budget requests, and frontline routines? When do they change decisions rather than remain reporting exercises?
- How does equity information shape staffing, street-level discretion, administrative burden, capacity, and service design? Which levers and bottlenecks matter most?
- What leadership, analytic capacity, routines, and learning cultures enable its use? Who determines disaggregation, and how do analysts, data staff, and middle managers shape what leaders see?
- When do equity metrics encourage gaming, cream skimming, displacement of unmeasured goals, or harm to untargeted groups?

2. Conditions for Adoption, Success, and Failure
- What prompts organizations to adopt MFEP—political leadership, community pressure, legal mandates, professional networks, external funding, or crisis?
- When does MFEP improve outcomes for disadvantaged groups, and when does it stall, fail, or remain symbolic? How do stakeholder power, protective institutions, representative bureaucracy, fiscal stress, and capacity matter?
- Which features—subgroup targets, gap-closing or growth measures, equity-weighted indicators, intersectional data, or equity scoring in budgets and capital plans—make a difference, and for whom?
- How are equity and other performance values, including efficiency, effectiveness, and responsiveness, reconciled under resource decline?

3. Who Defines Equity? Standards, Values, and Voice
- How are equity goals, standards, and indicators established through expertise, political bargaining, legal requirements, or community deliberation? How do managers and stakeholders negotiate and interpret them?
- How do organizations navigate conflicts between equal treatment and equitable outcomes, or among group-based, place-based, and universal approaches, amid political polarization?
- How can affected communities co-define, co-produce, and co-assess equity performance? How are inclusiveness, representativeness, and data reliability balanced, and when do community data or counter-accounts gain legitimacy?
- How can systems capture dignity, trust, procedural justice, repair, and intersectional experience without extraction or box-checking?

4. Humans, Algorithms, and Equitable Performance
- When do AI and emerging technologies reduce burden and reveal disparities, and when do they encode and scale inequity?
- How should the whole human–algorithm system be assessed—access and take-up, distributed errors, reversals, appeal time and burden, subgroup outcomes, and managerial responses?
- How do frontline workers and managers override, defer to, or selectively follow algorithmic tools, and with what distributional effects?
- How can impact assessments, audits, transparency registers, recalibration, sunset provisions, and participatory oversight prevent contested values from being locked into technology? What do failures and comparative regulatory regimes teach us?

5. Sustaining MFEP Under Political Uncertainty
- How are MFEP initiatives sustained, adapted, relabeled, or abandoned as leadership, law, or funding changes? What happens to metrics, targets, staff, and budgets when equity offices close or change names?
- Does embedding MFEP in statutes, budgets, data infrastructure, professional standards, and routines protect it from reversal or produce compliance without commitment?
- We welcome longitudinal and process-tracing studies following indicators through budget negotiations, appropriations, spending, implementation, and outcomes, or tracing an initiative over time.
- What do quieter approaches to equity, or approaches under other labels, mean for transparency, accountability, and democratic legitimacy?

6. Advocating, Communicating, and Diffusing MFEP
- How is MFEP communicated to elected officials, employees, and the public? How do frames such as equity, fairness, access, opportunity, and burden reduction shape support across partisan and ideological audiences?
- How do policy networks, advocacy coalitions, professional associations, intermediaries, policy entrepreneurs, and internal champions advance or resist MFEP?
- How does MFEP spread, or fail to spread, across jurisdictions, sectors, and countries? What is gained or lost in translation?
We also welcome comparative, critical, empirical, and conceptual work that advances the research and practice of MFEP. Failures, null results, and unintended consequences matter as much as successes.

Critical, interpretive, constructivist, community-engaged, and participatory approaches are encouraged, including work that challenges mainstream paradigms, centers historically marginalized voices, or reflects the diversity of global public administration.