Creating Public Value In Practice

Creating Public Value in Practice: Advancing the Common Good in a Multi-Sector, Shared-Power, No-One-Wholly-in-Charge World brings together a stellar cast of thinkers to explore issues of public and cross-sector decision-making within a framework of democratic civic engagement. It offers an integrative approach to understanding and applying the con

A seminal figure in the field of public management, Mark H. Moore presents his summation of fifteen years of research, observation, and teaching about what public sector executives should do to improve the performance of public enterprises. Useful for both practicing public executives and those who teach them, this book explicates some of the richest of several hundred cases used at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and illuminates their broader lessons for government managers. Moore addresses four questions that have long bedeviled public administration: What should citizens and their representatives expect and demand from public executives? What sources can public managers consult to learn what is valuable for them to produce? How should public managers cope with inconsistent and fickle political mandates? How can public managers find room to innovate? Moore’s answers respond to the well-understood difficulties of managing public enterprises in modern society by recommending specific, concrete changes in the practices of individual public managers: how they envision what is valuable to produce, how they engage their political overseers, and how they deliver services and fulfill obligations to clients. Following Moore’s cases, we witness dilemmas faced by a cross-section of public managers: William Ruckelshaus and the Environmental Protection Agency; Jerome Miller and the Department of Youth Services; Miles Mahoney and the Park Plaza Redevelopment Project; David Sencer and the swine flu scare; Lee Brown and the Houston Police Department; Harry Spence and the Boston Housing Authority. Their work, together with Moore’s analysis, reveals how public managers can achieve their true goal of producing public value.

Over the last 10 years, the concept of value has emerged in both business and public life as part of an important process of measuring, benchmarking, and assuring the resources we invest and the outcomes we generate from our activities. In the context of public life, value is an important measure on the contribution to business and social good of activities for which strict financial measures are either inappropriate or fundamentally unsound. A systematic, interdisciplinary examination of public value is necessary to establish an essential definition and up-to-date picture of the field. In reflecting on the ‘public value project’, this book points to how the field has broadened well beyond its original focus on public sector management; has deepened in terms of the development of the analytical concepts and frameworks that linked the concepts together; and has been applied increasingly in concrete circumstances by academics, consultants, and practitioners. This book covers three main topics; deepening and enriching the theory of creating public value, broadening the theory and practice of creating public value to voluntary and commercial organisations and collaborative networks, and the challenge and opportunity that the concept of public value poses to social science and universities. Collectively, it offers new ways of looking at public and social assets against a backdrop of increasing financial pressure; new insights into changing social attitudes and perceptions of value; and new models for increasingly complicated collaborative forms of service delivery, involving public, private, and not-for-profit players.

Authors from around the world assess the impact of public value in different countries and take the analysis beyond the US context of Moore's original book. Public value theory is applied to a range of policy areas - including education, health and social policy - and to issues like participatory democracy and public leadership. --Book Jacket.

This text provides a concise and internationalized restatement of the public value approach, an assessment of its impact to date - in theory and practice - and of its particular relevance to the challenges of public management in a time of crisis and austerity.

Governments and nonprofits exist to create public value. Yet what does that mean in theory and practice? This new volume brings together key experts in the field to offer unique, wide-ranging answers. From the United States, Europe, and Australia, the contributors focus on the creation, meaning, measurement, and assessment of public value in a world where government, nonprofit organizations, business, and citizens all have roles in the public sphere. In so doing, they demonstrate the intimate link between ideas of public value and public values and the ways scholars theorize and measure them. They also add to ongoing debates over what public value might mean, the nature of the most important public values, and how we can practically apply these values. The collection concludes with an extensive research and practice agenda conceived to further the field and mainstream its ideas. Aimed at scholars, students, and stakeholders ranging from business and government to nonprofits and activist groups, Public Value and Public Administration is an essential blueprint for those interested in creating public value to advance the common good.

Mark H. Moore’s now classic Creating Public Value offered advice to public managers about how to create public value. But that book left a key question unresolved: how could one recognize (in an accounting sense) when public value had been created? Here, Moore closes the gap by setting forth a philosophy of performance measurement that will help public managers name, observe, and sometimes count the value they produce, whether in education, public health, safety, crime prevention, housing, or other areas. Blending case studies with theory, he argues that private sector models built on customer satisfaction and the bottom line cannot be transferred to government agencies. The Public Value Account (PVA), which Moore develops as an alternative, outlines the values that citizens want to see produced by, and reflected in, agency operations. These include the achievement of collectively defined missions, the fairness with which agencies operate, and the satisfaction of clients and other stake-holders. But strategic public managers also have to imagine and execute strategies that sustain or increase the value they create into the future. To help public managers with that task, Moore offers a Public Value Scorecard that focuses on the actions necessary to build legitimacy and support for the envisioned value, and on the innovations that have to be made in existing operational capacity. Using his scorecard, Moore evaluates the real-world management strategies of such former public managers as D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams, NYPD Commissioner William Bratton, and Commissioner of the Minnesota Department of Revenue John James.

This book explores the vitally important concepts of shared power and shared-power arrangements as fundamental ways in which public issues can be addressed. These power-sharing relationships take many forms, including intergovernmental, interagency, public-private and joint private arrangements.