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A review of papers on public sector accounting in emerging economies, as published in the Journal of Accounting in Emerging Economies' (JAEE) first decade.

A reflection on the issues covered and achievements made in the reviewed papers in the context of extant knowledge in this domain.

A majority of the research in JAEE is dominated by accounting reforms inspired by New Public Management (NPM). Performance management, budgeting and accrual accounting are the main topics in the reviewed research. NPM claims, which can range from usability and use of a new accounting repertoire to desirable impacts on efficiency and service delivery, are often not fulfilled. Many papers attempt to explain failing accounting innovations by the local context in which they are embedded, including political instability, poor governance and a lack of capabilities.

The paper reviews research in a niche journal, but the findings are related to wider public sector accounting literature.

Public sector practitioners, but also researchers, need to move away from a focus on public sector reforms due to contextual circumstances leading to built-in failures and concentrate instead on understanding how the accounting repertoire works in practice, including routes for improvements therein.

An original framework for analysing public sector accounting research in emerging economies is proposed, which, among others, distinguishes between various ambition levels for achieving NPM reforms.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether and how evolving ideas about management control (MC) emerge in research about public sector performance management (PSPM).

This is a literature review on PSPM research through using a set of key terms derived from a review of recent developments in MC.

MC research, originating in the management accounting discipline, is largely disconnected from PSPM research as part of public administration and public management disciplines. Overlaps between MC and PSPM research are visible in a cybernetic control approach, control variety and contingency-based reasoning. Both academic communities share an understanding of certain issues, although under diverging labels, especially enabling controls or, in a more general sense, usable performance controls, horizontal controls and control packaging. Specific MC concepts are valuable for future PSPM research, i.e. trust as a complement of performance-based controls in complex settings, and strategy as a variable in contingency-based studies.

Breaking the boundaries between two currently remote research disciplines, on the one hand, might dismantle “would-be” innovations in one of these disciplines, and, on the other hand, may provide a fertile soil for mutual transfer of knowledge. A limitation of the authors’ review of PSPM research is that it may insufficiently cover research published in the public sector accounting journals, which could be an outlet for MC-inspired PSPM research.

The paper unravels the “apparent” and “real” differences between MC and PSPM research, and, in doing so, takes the detected “real” differences as a starting point for discussing in what ways PSPM research can benefit from MC achievements.

The purpose of this paper is to dismantle the complex issue of “use of accounting information (AI)” by pointing to different groups of information users, diverging interests and needs of these user groups and various influential factors on the usability and the actual use of AI.

This paper includes a literature review and conceptual reflections.

The review of recently published articles on the issue of “use of accounting information” presents an actual picture of the academic debate on purposes of use, user types, needs of various user groups and factors influencing the usability and the actual use of AI. The subsequent conceptual reflections deal with so far less regarded user groups, with options to strengthen the user perspective in budgeting and financial reporting, with approaches for engaging users in the content of accounting documents, with interrelations between user needs, usability and use intensity, including various antecedents of the different variables of the information-use issue.

This paper presents promising routes for future research.

The paper emphasizes the importance of paying more attention to the specific information needs and the motivations of various stakeholder groups generally interested in using financial information.

The paper presents results of reviewing recent literature on the issue of “use of accounting information” and provides some insight into specific aspects of this issue.

Aims to show how interview data may be used to obtain an indication of the price elasticity of household electricity consumption. Examines how respondents think they will react to price changes.

This paper aims to discuss the question of how the possible gaps between academic and practical accounting research can be reduced and how academics could make a contribution to solving the practical problems of organizations.

A reflection on Van de Ven and Johnson's ideas about “engaged scholarship” as a way for overcoming the gap between academic and practical knowledge creation, illustrated with examples coming from public sector accounting research.

Although academic consultant/researchers, who conduct research of direct relevance to practice, ideally must have research objectives in mind that go beyond the practical problems of the organization in order to address academically relevant goals, this is often not feasible. This is due to the fact that academically relevant research questions can often only be identified when a practice-oriented research project has already taken shape. The authors argue and illustrate that a pragmatic form of engaged scholarship in public sector accounting research implies that such research results in a variety of outputs. Some of the outputs will have direct relevance to the practitioners and others to the academics involved, whilst the outputs that are relevant to each of these two groups will only partly show connections and overlaps.

The preoccupation of academic researchers with publications in high-ranking journals, due to pressures from their universities and peer groups, threatens research projects with a potential relevance for practice, because their publication opportunities are uncertain in advance. The authors welcome researchers who want to take this type of risk, and the authors challenge university officials and journal editors to broaden their view on excellence in research beyond the scope of their traditional academic domains.

The paper offers a realistic way out of serving two seemingly different research goals, practice-relevance and academic rigour.

The purpose of this paper is to explain how and why the initially ambitious reform of the Dutch water sector turned into a moderate pace of change. The explanations are based on institutional theory.

This paper is a case study at the organizational field level of the Dutch water sector.

In order to enhance efficiency and transparency, Dutch Central Government initially attempted to enforce top‐down radical changes, including the formation of integrated water chain companies. However, after discussions and reactions of the interested parties, the central government authorised a bottom‐up approach, giving discretional powers to the individual water organizations. This transition to a bottom‐up approach can mainly be explained by the limited pressure exerted by the central government to change and the powerful position of the relevant organizations within the water sector, as well as their ability to establish strong coalitions to avoid mandatory radical changes.

The theoretical background is useful in analysing the change processes in other public sectors.

The Dutch way of consensus seeking might be threatened by its own inertia, and in the case of ineffectiveness, it could be replaced by a more top‐down and radical reform package.

Unravelling public sector reform into goals, means and approaches is useful, because although goals can remain the same during the change process, the means and approaches may be altered. Resistance to radical changes might stimulate convergent change options, such as reinforcement of the existing means of reform and may also decrease the embededdness and impermeability of the institutional fields.

This paper aims to explore the influence of specific characteristics of the public sector in developing countries (i.e. a low‐institutional capacity, a limited involvement of stakeholders, and high levels of corruption and informality), and of reforms of this sector, on public sector performance measurement (PSPM).

Based on a review of prior literature, the paper develops understanding of the demand for and supply of performance information in developing countries, and of changes in this area.

The paper argues that public sector organisations in developing countries are likely to face an unbalanced position, i.e. disequilibrium between the demand for and supply of performance information. More precisely, the public sector reforms – which are partly stimulated by a growing involvement of some stakeholders – lead to an increasing demand for performance information but, because of the low‐institutional capacity and the high level of corruption, this increasing demand is not always followed by a sufficient supply of performance information. This leads to an “unsatisfied demand” position.

The paper concludes with an overview of issues related to PSPM in a developing country context that require further investigation.

The arguments presented in this paper are summarised in an overview of factors that influence the demand for and supply of performance information in the public sector in developing countries. This overview might be helpful to those who are involved in the design of performance measurement systems in these countries.

So far, relatively little is known about PSPM in a developing country context. This paper is an attempt to fill this gap.

In the New Public Governance (NPG) paradigm, citizens play a vital role in the decision-making of public organisations and are fundamental to aligning their expectations with service delivery. Citizen engagement could be realised in the budgeting process by adopting participatory budgeting (PB) even if previous literature on PB does not focus on this tool design issue. Therefore, this study aims to understand which PB institutional design arrangements help enhance citizen participation.

A deductive content analysis and a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis were carried out on the PB regulations of 100 Italian municipalities.

The results suggest that the PB design can be elaborated in different ways that do not always guarantee the involvement of citizens. Virtuous municipalities engage citizens from the start of the process and in the most relevant discussion and deliberation phases. A simple legislative provision does not guarantee a real introduction of participatory governance.

This study theorises citizen participation in PB and examines it through empirical evidence to define relationships between PB design arrangements and citizen engagement.