The Study On The Performance Management Of Chinese Scientific Funding Agency

With the policy changes in public financial expenditure management and public accountability reinforcement in developed countries since 1990s, the performance evaluation of scientific funding agencies has gradually changed from ex-ante evaluation on scientific research (scientific value judgment) into the performance management with strategic orientation. Currently, the scientific funding agencies in China are at the stage of changing from the single performance evaluation to the performance management with the performance evaluation as the centre; however, it still has not formed a complete performance management system. How to set up a performance management system that could adjust to the new situation, encourage innovation, provide the accurate guidance for scientific research and improve the usage effectiveness and efficiency of scientific research has become a new challenge jointly faced by the government and scientific field.The performance management of scientific funding agencies involves social public satisfaction, the performance of public expenditure input and research resources allocation etc. This thesis shall firstly discuss about how to carry out the performance management, what to manage and how to manage for the scientific funding agencies and then systematically analyze various stakeholders'needs in performance management and the purpose and method of performance management in scientific funding agencies by adopting the Principal-Agent Theory.By adopting the literature review, case study and comparison analysis and on the basis of systematical analysis of the performance management practice of scientific funding agencies in developed countries such as National Science Foundation, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, Society for the Promotion of Science etc. and current performance management of National Natural Science Foundation of China, this thesis has pointed out that the scientific funding agencies in our country have such issues as 1) lacking of performance law; 2) lacking of national goals for basic research; 3) valuing funding performance and despising the management performance; 4) valuing the performance evaluation and despising the performance management; 5) valuing the short term performance and despising the long term evaluation and the occurring reasons. It is quite necessary to strengthen the performance management legislation in scientific funding agencies as soon as possible to set up the multiple performance management system with the definite national target as the premise, the budget and audit as the management support, the improvement and demonstration as the purpose, the strategic planning, performance plan and performance report as the basic framework and performance management as the main content.