Challenges to Public Value Creation

Government is a process in which officials use public authority to require citizens to change their behaviour to promote outcomes that will benefit society as a whole (public value). However, where there is respect for people and people are heterogeneous, it is not possible to know which actions in government will (or will not) add to public value with sufficient confidence to justify the use of public authority. The best that is possible are opinions about what will benefit the public and opinions are not sufficient. Unknowability is demonstrated by reference to all possible forms of ‘the public.’ Unknowability does not mean that government is impossible. Instead it means that officials must attend to appropriate processes including consultation, deliberation, democracy and the rule of law.

As a practical matter, the normative standard of objective knowability in defining and pursuing public value is impossible to meet. The path forward for those who hope to create public value working from positions in government depends critically on those individuals giving greater respect—in thought, speech, and action—to what are often regarded as “mere” procedural rights in making, implementing, and evaluating authoritative public policy decisions. The reason is that procedural rights are grounded in the desire to create a substantive human experience of individual dignity, autonomy, and equality in political, social, and economic realms. Legitimating the public choices that use the authority of the state to create more prosperous, free, secure, tolerant, and just societies depends critically on public leaders who use the guidance that comes from procedural rights to enact and advance a commitment to protect and enhance not just the material conditions, but also the economic, social, and political relationships that characterize the societies they govern.

Even in the face of great uncertainties, limited knowledge, imperfect data, and flawed processes of decision making, there is reason to be optimistic that democratic governments can make good decisions and achieve good outcomes for their citizens. Knowing fully what public value is, and how and when it is created and realized, before taking action is an unrealistic standard. Democracies can combine the expressions of citizen preferences by various means with technical and administrative expertise to make good public policy over time and to improve the authorities and processes they need to address the continuing challenges to creating public value.

In response to Mark Prebble’s most inspiring ideas on the unknowability of public value, I call for a more process-oriented public value research where human needs are at center stage. Based on self-organization theory, I propose to describe public value dynamics as a complex interplay of different values linking the individual (micro) and collective (macro) level. The chapter concludes that public value is knowable at any given point, but its future direction cannot be predicted.

Government is legitimate if the governed accept the role of governors in coordinating collective activity. Where the governed believe that their views on public policy are correct and that the governors’ policies are incorrect, the governed have a conflict of duties. However, where the governed know that public value is unknowable it is reasonable for the governed to accept that government directions are legitimate even when they disagree with those policies, so long as appropriate processes are observed. A thought experiment shows that unknowability is a necessary condition for legitimacy.

This chapter contributes to the discussion of public value creation by examining the role of nonprofits in public service delivery through the lens of a specific policy context: veterans services. In this process, we present descriptive data from a sample of 70 nonprofits serving veterans along with qualitative data from in-depth interviews with 13 executive leaders of these organizations. While the chapter is situated in a specific policy context, the case built in our chapter is that nonprofit involvement in service delivery can produce public value in a variety of measurable ways.

Drawing on the case of the state receivership or emergency manager system in four Michigan cities following the Great Recession of 2007, this chapter investigates the nature and substance of conflict among public values embedded in the fiscal emergency context. Qualitative content analysis of approximately 400 official documents collected from the four municipalities under the emergency management intervention highlights tensions among political and administrative values involved in this case and identifies underlying reasons for contestation. We use the grounded theory approach to make sense of the underlying context embedded in these administrative documents and to delve into the process of public value creation and the resulting tensions among public values. The findings reveal the dominance of the value of financial accountability over other democratic values, such as checks and balances, representation, self-governance, and local control. We also find that the value of financial accountability has been elevated by centralizing the decision-making process and strengthening the powers of unelected managers. The chapter offers implications of these findings for policy learning and strengthening public participation when there is evidence of public value conflict in the decision-making process, and suggests ideas and questions for future research.

This chapter examines the relationship between leadership and public value, which is particularly challenging in a context of explicit contest and conflict. The theoretical framework is illustrated through a case study of policing rural crime. The study reveals that the police worked with multiple and competing publics, not a single homogeneous public, and that part of their leadership role was to create and convene a public space in which different voices and divergent views could be expressed. The study notes that research needs to pay attention to the loss and displacement of public value not solely its creation and recognition. The need to convene multiple publics required the police to lead, as part of a leadership constellation, and with political astuteness. The findings have wider relevance for other public services, and for studies of leadership and public value at the intersection between the state and civil society.

This chapter explores the integration of a public values perspective and a focus on frontline value crafting to strategically develop, utilize, and assess public value and its creation within street-level organizations. We argue that public value is inherently pluralistic and subject to conflicting interpretations, as it involves ongoing differentiation in meaning, prioritization, and enactment of multiple, co-existing, and conflicting values within the working reality of street-level organizations. Within these organizations, frontline professionals play a crucial role in shaping the meaning and implementation of public value on the ground, actively participating in the micro-creation of public value. Accordingly, we consider the process of public value creation as immanent, observable in every activity, action, and decision made by individual frontline professionals. Considering the practical implications of our argument, we propose two concrete approaches to address frontline public value creation and progress its understanding: the lens of craftsmanship practices and the mapping of institutional logics.

This chapter starts discussing some challenges in the use of the concept of public value as well as the importance of context for its conception and application, to then discuss the ways Moore’s ideas were considered in the works of some Latin American authors, divided in three general topics: public management; public policy, citizen participation and governance, and ethics. The chapter concludes that for the scholars of this region when decision-makers in the public sector consider public value explicitly they may make better decisions than they would otherwise. Although most of the discussed authors’ works use the concept of public value in a very general way, that is important because it moves policymakers away from any simplistic reliance on economic models to define what is valuable in the public sector.

Various frameworks or models have been proposed to help guide public managers in public value creation. This chapter argues that they are heuristics designed to address the unknowability problem of public value creation, playing a similar role as many other heuristics in the public administration literature. However, the public value heuristics are not a panacea, and they suffer from insufficient attention to the ethical uncertainties inherent in the value creation process. Four alternative ways of incorporating ethics into public value heuristics are discussed: integrating public value heuristics (e.g., the strategic triangle) with ethics heuristics (e.g., the ethics triangle), identifying major ethical issues in public value creation, examining the cognitive ethical bias that public managers may encounter in value-creation decisions, and attending to institutional ethics that support public value creation.

The chapter’s central argument is for enhancements to public value planning and decision-making that occurs at the street level. These enhancements include strategies that place a keen emphasis on the vulnerabilities of each citizen, and the incorporation of concepts like intersectionality and equity. The discussion outlines key elements that are missing from the public value equation, provides definitions for relevant concepts, and outlines the details of a proposal for change. Some of the proposed changes are subtle, but they are important to how we create, implement, and evaluate public value. The proposed changes include a shift in the administrator’s motivation and approach to citizen involvement in the creation of public value, the inclusion of vulnerability scorecards in both the goalsetting process and the implementation of public value goals, and the alignment of planning for public value with traditional planning logics. Aspects of the proposal will be illustrated by way of a real-world example which is the implementation of the COVID-19 Economic Impact Payments.

Our search for public value, in terms of definition and creation, seems to remain elusive. The contributions of Mark Prebble in this volume and elsewhere have highlighted the messiness of the public context and, thus, public value. That messiness extends to strategic planning, which often lacks actual strategic thinking. This reality makes the search for public value using strategic planning difficult, if not utterly futile. However, in Prebble’s arguments about public value, there is a glimmer of hope in calling for humility in government. I argue in this chapter that humility, creativity, and adaptability in strategy development might get us closer to public value than formal strategic planning ever did.