systematics 336 AnnotationThe paper examines theoretical and practical issues connected with performance evaluation, performance management and performance financing in public administration, using cases from the Czech Republic and Slovakia to draw con-clusions, focusing on the specific environment of transitional societies. The cases examined are the civil service performance evaluation, performance manage-ment in the public administration offices and performance financing of universi-ties. All selected cases show that the potential of performance evaluation, per-formance management and performance financing is significantly limited by concrete ways of their implementation and also because of specific environment of developing democracies. Because of this fact we propose to focus more on the benchmarking, which should serve as more effective tool for given environment