At the heart of new governance regimes for local governments is community – based performance
management - a construct which describes the intersection of rational decision making with citizen
participation, the latter achieved through community engagement initiatives. We can take it as sufficiently
settled that idea behind modern public administration is rational decision making, and this rationality is
a key principle along the continuum from management-centric approaches to those that aspire to
community-centered performance management. This paper investigates the concepts of rational decision
making and satisficing as they apply to attempts to increase citizen participation in the work of
government. The paper identifies key issues for further research, and advances a model of performance
management that can be used to examine the elements of decision making about means-ends choices.