Defining and creating value for the public.

• Author: Kavanagh, Shayne
• Position: Recognizing Public Value - Book review

Recognizing Public Value

Mark H. Moore

Harvard University Press, 2013

$59,95, 496 pages

Mark Moore, a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, is one of the leaders of a an academic movement that studies and advocates for the concept of "public value." Public value asks public officials to consider the benefits and costs of public services not only in terms of dollars and cents, but also in terms of how government actions affect important civic and democratic principles such as equity, liberty, responsiveness, transparency, participation, and citizenship. Public value seeks to provide public officials with the ability to talk about the net benefit of government actions, while overcoming the limitations inherent in attempting to create a "bottom line" that is analogous to that of the private sector. Moore first started writing about public value in 1997 with Creating Public Value: Strategic Management in Government. In his most recent book, Recognizing Public Value, Moore describe how public managers can translate the ideas of public value into a tangible system of managing performance and resources.

THE STRATEGIC TRIANGLE

A good place to start understanding public value in greater detail is what Moore refers to as the "strategic triangle" (see Exhibit 1). The strategic triangle shows that public value is created when a given strategy or action has democratic legitimacy (e.g., the community supports it) and the support of the authorizing environment (e.g., a governing board), and when the government has the operational capacity to implement the strategy or action effectively. Exhibit 1 also shows that there is a feedback system in place --when public value is created, so is greater legitimacy and support (e.g., citizens and elected officials have greater trust in the government), and operational capacity is increased (e.g., financial and other resources could be easier to obtain). In short, success begets success.

In Recognizing Public Value, Moore describes how governments can develop a performance measurement and management system that will:

* Force a definition of what exactly what constitutes "public value" for a given agency, program, etc.

* Help mobilize and build legitimacy and support.

* Help animate and guide operational capacity.

However, before describing the mechanisms that Moore proposes to accomplish these three goals, we should review four key points about strategic management that undergird Moore's approach:

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