The Changing Landscape of Public Value Creation and Management: Embracing A Societal Perspective

Public value is intrinsic to all discussions related to the public sphere and public life – consisting of the social, political and economic dimensions of them. Discussions on public value have been central to public administration and public management scholarship and practices (Alford & O’Flynn, 2008; Bryson, Crosby & Bloomberg, 2014). Although it is not a new concept, the last three decades have witnessed a surge in public value literature. The key interest has been in understanding the process of creating, realizing, and managing public value. The key credit for re-emergence of the concept in public administration and management scholarship goes primarily to Mark Moore (1995) and his seminal book Creating Public Value. The comeback of the concept was widely celebrated in academic training and research, and received considerable endorsement from scholars, public servants, and policy advisers. Evidence of such endorsements can be found in the academic curriculum and special journal issues and symposiums. Public value enthusiasts viewed this re-emergence as “a new public administration movement” that moves beyond traditional and new public management (Bryson et. al., 2014). It has been even coined as a “new paradigm” (Benington, 2015; O’flynn, 2007; Stoker, 2006). The last two decades have witnessed a plethora of symposiums and special journal issues on public value. Among them are the special issue on public value in the Australian Journal of Public Administration (AJPA) in 2004, the symposium on “Creating Public Value in a Multi-Sector, Shared-Power’ in 2012, the special issue in Public Administration Review (PAR) in 2014, the special issues on public value in the American Review of Public Administration (ARPA) in 2014, and in the International Journal of Public Administration (IJPA) in 2016 and 2021 (Bryson et al., 2014; Fukumoto & Bozeman, 2019; Jørgensen & Rutgers, 2015; Van Der Wal, 2016). In many reputed educational programs, “from Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University to the Warwick Business School in the UK and the Melbourne Business School in Australia” (Rhodes & Wanna, 2007, pp. 406-407), public value has been central to training public managers. However, ambiguity remains among proponents of public value as to what it entails.