Focusing on public value: Something new and something old

This article develops two propositions. First, that the public sector needs new stories that make sense of recent storms of change. Second, that focusing on ‘public value’ helps tell a useful new story. Much contemporary commentary comes from analysts working within a particular field of thought. However, problems of public policy and management are hard to discipline. Public value is not the property of particular political parties, public service institutions, academic disciplines or professions. Public value is defined and redefined through social and political interaction. Such interaction involves politicians, officials and communities. Focusing on public value enables one to aggregate issues for scholarly analysis in terms that should also make sense to citizens and communities, political activists and people responsible for delivering public services. The article argues that: recent agendas for public sector change overlap and that implementation is incomplete; the skills of analysts and activists in the public sector, and in associated sectors delivering public services, need large components of expertise in interpreting ambiguous patterns and the management of complex relationships; and that the cumulative impact of succeeding agendas is to widen the scope of issues in play. Large components in both reform and agendas have involved bringing the public sector firmly under political control. However, the later emphasis on consultation and participation places political executives under great pressure. The more deliberation is promised the more is demanded. There is increasing pressure for the task of exploring for public value to be shared more widely. The article develops its key propositions by exploring three main themes: first, the notion of public value and the emphasis in it on search and interaction as a basis for political and managerial leadership; second, the contested impacts of recent agendas of change in the public and other affected sectors which have widened the scope of issues in play but have left key institutional and policy issues unresolved; and, third, a sample of current and emerging issues in which asking questions about public value may help activists, politicians and managers more creatively focus their attention. Focusing on public value can help communities, service providers and political leaders ask and answer a new and wider range of questions while continuing to learn from recent experience, however complex and contested.