Learning Outcomes

By the end of this lesson, learners should be able to:

  • Apply the Public Value Framework to strategic public leadership and decision-making.

  • Lead strategic governance for the public good by balancing competing demands and stakeholder interests.

  • Co-create public value with citizens through inclusive engagement and participatory governance.

  • Balance public value, legitimacy, and operational capacity using the strategic triangle.

  • Measure public value and government impact using appropriate frameworks and indicators.

  • Navigate the tensions between different conceptions of public value in complex policy environments.

Introduction

Public value has become a cornerstone concept in modern public administration and governance. Developed in the mid-1990s by Professor Mark Moore of the Harvard Kennedy School, the public value framework emerged as part of the quest to find a strategic approach guiding public managers in their roles. Rather than focusing solely on efficiency, cost reduction, or compliance, the public value approach challenges public leaders to articulate a clear purpose and enlist others to support their conception of value.

At its core, public value is about what the public values and what adds value to the public sphere. It shifts the focus from inputs and processes to outcomes and impacts—asking not just whether government is doing things right, but whether it is doing the right things. As the UK government’s framework for delivering better outcomes notes, for any chunk of public expenditure it should be clear what improvements to people’s lives that money is intended to deliver. If there is no compelling answer to this question, the case for spending the money is doubtful.

This lesson provides a comprehensive exploration of public value creation and strategic governance. It examines the Public Value Framework, the strategic triangle, co-creation with citizens, measuring public value, and the tensions inherent in defining and pursuing public value in complex governance environments.

1. The Public Value Framework

The Public Value Framework provides a strategic approach for public managers to identify, create, and sustain value for citizens and society. It represents a fundamental shift from traditional public administration and New Public Management approaches.

The Origins and Purpose of Public Value

Public value developed in the mid-1990s as part of the quest to find a strategic approach guiding public managers in their roles. Professor Mark Moore from the Harvard Kennedy School is considered the architect of the approach. In conceptualising public value, Moore drew on strategy theory in the private sector, incorporating:

  • The importance of the environment in which managers operate

  • Operational capacity to get things done

  • Articulating the value that managers sought to create

Moore saw public management as conceiving and implementing public policies that realise the potential of a given political and institutional setting. He later reframed this as creating public value. The approach challenges public managers to move beyond simply administering programs to actively shaping what government does and how it creates value for citizens.

The public value framework has been described as both a paradigm of public management—a way of understanding and explaining a post-New Public Management world—and a rhetoric strategy, justifying public managers’ interests and their movement into the political domain. It has also been understood as a narrative: a story of the world of public managers, and as a way of gauging the performance of policies and public institutions.

Core Concepts of Public Value

Several core concepts underpin the Public Value Framework:

Public Value as Contribution to the Public Sphere: This captures notions of what the public values and what adds value to the public sphere. It recognizes that value is not simply what government produces but what citizens and communities consider valuable.

Public Value as Desired Outcomes: This focuses on the value created by public organisations and public managers as it relates to desired outcomes. It shifts attention from activities and outputs to the results that matter to citizens.

Public Value as Strategic Heuristic: This focuses on the strategic triangle as a heuristic tool, exploring how managers seek to balance and align aspects of the triangle. The strategic triangle provides a framework for strategic thinking about public value creation.

Public Value as Process and Outcome: Recent scholarship distinguishes between instrumental values (process-oriented) and prime values (ends in themselves). According to Jørgensen and Bozeman, “prime values are those that are ends in themselves whereas an instrumental value is valued for its ability to achieve other values”. This distinction helps public leaders understand both how value is created (process) and what value is created (outcomes).

2. The Strategic Triangle

The strategic triangle is the core analytical tool of the Public Value Framework. It provides three tests for the public manager, capturing the key elements that must be balanced and aligned for effective public value creation.

The Three Tests of the Strategic Triangle

Moore’s strategic triangle provides three essential tests that public managers must apply to any strategy or initiative:

1. Substantive Value: The strategy must be aimed at creating something that is substantively valuable. This test asks: Does this initiative create value for citizens and society? What improvements to people’s lives will it deliver? Without a compelling answer to this question, the case for public action is doubtful.

2. Legitimacy and Political Sustainability: The strategy must be legitimate and politically sustainable. This test asks: Will this initiative be supported by the authorizing environment? Is it consistent with legal frameworks and democratic values? Does it have the backing of elected officials, stakeholders, and the public?

3. Operational and Administrative Feasibility: The strategy must be operationally and administratively feasible. This test asks: Can government deliver this initiative effectively? Does the organization have the capacity, resources, and capabilities needed to implement it successfully?

The strategic triangle also highlights two environments that public managers must navigate:

The Task Environment: This is where innovative public managers spot problems to be solved or social conditions to improve. It encompasses the substantive policy challenges and opportunities that government seeks to address.

The Authorizing Environment: This comprises the actors that can provide legitimacy and support, or veto value creation. This can include lawmakers, interest groups, clients, other parts of government, regulators, or the public.

Balancing the Triangle

Keeping these three elements aligned is a central task in the value creation process. However, this is not a one-time achievement but an ongoing process of balancing competing demands. The challenge is particularly acute because what constitutes public value is a contested and political space.

Public managers are challenged to articulate a clear purpose and enlist others to support their conception of value. This requires strategic thinking, political intelligence, and the ability to build coalitions across the authorizing environment. It also requires operational capacity to deliver on commitments and demonstrate results.

The UK government’s framework for public value identifies four pillars that parallel the strategic triangle:

  • Pursuing Goals: Understanding goals and indicators, and setting an appropriate degree of ambition

  • Legitimacy and Acceptability: Ensuring decisions are made in ways that are legitimate and acceptable with the rule of law

  • Efficient and Effective Delivery: Running institutions efficiently and building long-term capability

  • Stewardship: Passing institutions on to future governments in better shape than they were found

3. Co-Creating Public Value with Citizens

Public value is not created by government alone. It is co-created through collaboration with citizens, communities, and other stakeholders. This recognition has important implications for how public leaders approach governance.

The Shift to Co-Creation

Traditional models of public administration positioned citizens as passive recipients of services. The public value approach recognizes that citizens are active participants in value creation. Co-creation involves citizens and communities in shaping what government does and how it does it.

Research on strategic public value governance has identified key components of effective co-creation. These include:

Meaningful Participation and Engagement: Creating spaces and channels for engagement, empowering actors and community groups, and ensuring diverse stakeholder representation. Effective engagement moves beyond consultation to genuine partnership in decision-making.

Dialogue and Negotiation: Facilitating dialogue and deliberation, enabling negotiation and decision-making that reflects diverse perspectives. This requires skill in managing conversations across differences and building consensus.

Shared Value Proposition: Developing joint value definitions and coping strategies for value tensions. Co-creation requires that stakeholders share a common understanding of what value is being pursued, even when they have different interests.

The Authorizing Environment

The authorizing environment is central to co-creation. It comprises the actors that can provide legitimacy and support, or veto value creation. Public managers must actively engage with this environment to build support for public value initiatives.

Research on the authorizing environment highlights several key dynamics:

Vertical Democratic Accountability: The extent to which decisions and implementation are legal and responsive to authorizers. This includes accountability to elected officials and legal frameworks.

Horizontal Democratic Accountability: The extent to which decisions and implementation respond to collaboration partners and other stakeholders. This includes accountability to partners, civil society, and communities.

Procedural Legitimacy: The extent to which decisions are based on technically and administratively sound data, analysis, and planning, and the extent to which stakeholders perceive decisions and activities to be fair and transparent.

Relational Value: Trust, social networks, and social capital are essential for effective co-creation. Without trust, co-creation cannot succeed.

Citizen-Centered Governance

Citizen-centered governance places citizens at the heart of public service design and delivery. This requires:

Understanding Citizen Needs: Actively seeking to understand what citizens value and what outcomes matter to them. This goes beyond satisfaction surveys to genuine engagement in defining value.

Designing with Citizens: Involving citizens in the design of services and policies, not just consulting them after decisions are made. Co-design leads to more relevant and effective services.

Accountability to Citizens: Being accountable to citizens, not just to political masters or bureaucratic superiors. This requires transparency, responsiveness, and mechanisms for citizen feedback.

Building Public Trust: Recognizing that trust is both a foundation and an outcome of effective governance. Research demonstrates a strong positive correlation between public trust and service delivery.

4. Measuring Public Value and Government Impact

Measuring public value is challenging but essential for accountability, learning, and improvement. Unlike private sector value, which can be measured in financial terms, public value is multidimensional and often contested.

The Challenge of Measurement

Measuring public value is difficult for several reasons:

Multiple Dimensions: Public value encompasses economic, social, environmental, and democratic dimensions. No single metric can capture all these dimensions.

Contested Definitions: What constitutes public value is contested. Different stakeholders have different views on what matters and how it should be measured.

Long Time Horizons: Public value often takes years or decades to materialize. Short-term metrics may miss important long-term outcomes.

Attribution Problems: It is difficult to attribute outcomes to specific government actions, particularly when multiple actors are involved.

Frameworks for Measurement

Despite these challenges, several frameworks have been developed for measuring public value:

Public Value Attributes: Research has identified key public value attributes that can be assessed:

  • Democratic Accountability: Vertical and horizontal democratic accountability, including responsiveness to authorizers and stakeholders

  • Procedural Legitimacy: Procedural rationality (data and planning) and procedural justice (fairness and transparency)

  • Operational Control: Use of requirements, budgets, and schedules to oversee projects

  • Substantive Outputs: Effective and efficient performance, equity of benefits and costs

  • Problem-Solving Capacity: New behaviors or norms that increase the potential to address complex problems

Instrumental and Prime Values: This framework distinguishes between process-oriented values (instrumental) and outcome-oriented values (prime). Instrumental values include procedural legitimacy and relational value; prime values include democratic accountability and equal representation.

Performance Measurement Systems: Various performance management systems have been applied in the public sector, including the Balanced Scorecard, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), and Results-Based Management. Each has strengths and limitations, and the choice depends on context.

Results-Based Management

Results-Based Management (RBM) is a performance management approach that combines performance measurement with strategic planning and budgeting to ensure that an organisation’s goals are aligned with its policies and programmes. It emphasizes data-driven planning, monitoring and evaluation, and accountability.

Key elements of RBM include:

Alignment of Policy and Budget: Ensuring consistency between policy and budget. As one practitioner noted, “The provincial annual budget is now fully aligned with local development priorities, ensuring consistency between policy and budget”.

Data-Driven Planning: Using evidence and data to inform planning and resource allocation. RBM emphasizes the importance of data-driven decision-making.

Monitoring and Evaluation: Tracking progress and evaluating outcomes. RBM supports efficiency, accountability, and transparency across government.

Collaboration and Commitment: Strengthening collaboration and commitment among local stakeholders in planning, budgeting, and reporting processes.

5. Tensions and Critiques of Public Value

The public value approach has generated significant debate and critique. Understanding these tensions is essential for applying the framework effectively.

Empirical vs. Normative Theory

One persistent critique is whether public value is empirical or normative theory. Was Mark Moore explaining what public managers actually do or what he thought they should do? This tension reflects broader debates in public administration between descriptive and prescriptive approaches.

The critique is significant because it affects how public value should be applied. If it is primarily normative, it provides guidance on what public managers should do. If it is primarily empirical, it describes what they already do. The reality is likely both: the framework provides normative guidance that is grounded in empirical observation.

The Concept of Public Value Itself

There is ongoing debate about what public value actually means. Three views have been identified:

  • Public value as a contribution to the public sphere, capturing notions of what the public values and what adds value to the public sphere

  • The value created by public organisations and public managers as it relates to desired outcomes

  • A focus on the strategic triangle as a heuristic tool, exploring how managers seek to balance and align aspects of the triangle

This ambiguity can be a weakness if it leads to confusion or if the concept becomes a “catch-all” that loses analytical precision. However, it can also be a strength if it allows the framework to be adapted to different contexts.

The Relationship Between Politics and Public Value

Criticism has been levelled at the public value approach as it is seen as advocating a more ‘political’ role for public managers. In traditional public administration, public managers are expected to be neutral administrators, implementing policies decided by elected officials. The public value approach challenges this separation, encouraging public managers to actively shape what government does.

This critique raises important questions about the proper role of public servants in democratic governance. While public managers should certainly be creative and innovative, they must also respect democratic processes and the authority of elected officials. The strategic triangle’s emphasis on legitimacy and political sustainability is an important counterweight to concerns about public managers becoming too political.

Further Areas of Study

Scholars have identified several areas requiring further study:

  • How to better measure public value

  • Refinements of specific aspects of public value (e.g., distinct types of public value)

  • Examining parts of the strategic triangle in detail (e.g., the authorising environment)

  • Testing the applicability of public value in non-Western or non-democratic contexts

Recent research has also explored how the public value approach can be integrated with other frameworks, such as Bozeman’s policy-oriented public values approach. This integration provides a more comprehensive understanding of public value creation in multi-actor collaborations.

Key Takeaways

  • The Public Value Framework, developed by Mark Moore, provides a strategic approach for public managers to identify, create, and sustain value for citizens and society. It challenges public leaders to articulate a clear purpose and enlist others to support their conception of value .

  • The strategic triangle provides three tests for public managers: the strategy must be aimed at creating something substantively valuable; it must be legitimate and politically sustainable; and it must be operationally and administratively feasible .

  • Public value is co-created through collaboration with citizens, communities, and other stakeholders. Meaningful participation, dialogue, shared value propositions, and the authorizing environment are key components of effective co-creation .

  • Measuring public value requires frameworks that capture multiple dimensions: democratic accountability, procedural legitimacy, operational control, substantive outputs, and problem-solving capacity. Results-Based Management combines performance measurement with strategic planning and budgeting .

  • Tensions and critiques of public value include debates about whether it is empirical or normative theory, what public value actually means, and the appropriate relationship between politics and public administration. Further study is needed on measuring public value and applying it in non-Western contexts .

  • Recent scholarship integrates Moore’s managerial approach with Bozeman’s policy-oriented public values approach, distinguishing between instrumental values (process-oriented) and prime values (ends in themselves). This integration provides a more comprehensive framework for understanding and assessing public value creation .

PreviousNext