Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Do government officials respond to ambiguous policy goals? Previous work shows the

importance of goal setting in motivating government agency performance. Ambiguous policy

goals often disincentivize officials and decrease organizational accountability, negatively

impacting government officials’ engagement and performance. However, this is not always the

case, especially in a low-information context where policy experimentation is encouraged.

By analyzing the cadre evaluation system in China, I show ambiguous policy goals can still

invite enthusiastic, but often distorted, responses from government officials seeking to benefit

their careers. Taking advantage of goal ambiguity, officials invent their own performance

measures: government projects that emphasize visible efforts in delivering on policies, but that

do not emphasize the actual policy outcomes. Through the information gathering function of the performance evaluation system, these invented, highly visible performance measures are passed on to policy makers at the top. With little other information channels to examine the outcomes of these invented measures by the evaluated, these measures often replace the original ambiguous goals, thereby becoming more specific, but not necessarily optimal, new evaluation goals.

I show this process by examining the Chinese local officials’ responses to a series of ambiguous

environmental goals set by the Chinese central government in the 1990s, and how these

responses affect the formation of performance evaluation goals later. I focus on two policy

as my cases: solid waste reduction and wastewater treatment. When the Chinese central

government announced ambiguous goals of clean cities and clean water in the 1990s, Chinese

municipal officials enthusiastically responded with highly visible infrastructure construction,

mostly incineration plants and wastewater treatment plants. Meanwhile, the focus on these

visible projects diverted resources from other invisible supporting facilities that were necessary

to reach these policy goals, creating a lack of sewer pipes, sludge treatment facilities and waste

recycling facilities. Observing only the visible efforts by local officials, and without enough

information channels to examine the effectiveness of these local infrastructure projects, the

Chinese central government gradually turned these invented measures into policy goals, creating performance evaluation targets that were less than comprehensive in delivering the intended environment outcomes.

This paper aims to add to our understanding of the consequence of ambiguous policy goals on

government performance, and to show how goal ambiguity can create a vicious cycle of biased

goal setting that affect policy implementation in the long run.