The sustainable development goals and policy capacity: a case study of performance-based budgeting implementation in Iran

The realization of the goals of sustainable development (SDGs) presupposes administrative policy capacity. The NPM implementation is related to that capacity. Empirical research on this relationship has been conducted rarely in developing countries. To fill this gap, this research aims to study the impact of the policy capacity on the implementation of one of the NMP themes as well as a method to achieve SDGs, namely, performance-based budgeting (PBB) and the impact of PBB on increasing the policy capacity. Iran has been selected for a case study and the data from interviews as well as documents, news, and related scientific papers have been analyzed by a qualitative method. The results showed that 1) one of the requirements for realizing the SDGs is administrative policy capacity. 2) the lack of that capacity caused many problems for the implementation of the PBB by preventing the formulation of the budgeting system change plan and the appropriate annual plan. And, 3) the implementation of PBB did not increase the policy capacity.