Public Value Accounting: Establishing the Philosophical Basis

• Author: Mark H. Moore
• Published date: 01 July 2014
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12198
• Date: 01 July 2014

Mark H. Moore is Hauser Professor

of Non-Prof‌i t Organizations in the John

F. Kennedy School of Government at

Harvard University and Simon Professor

of Organizations, Management, and

Education in Harvard’s Graduate School

of Education. He is author of Creating

Public Value: Strategic Management

in Government (Harvard University Press,

1995) and Recognizing Public Value

(Harvard University Press, 2013).

E-mail: mark_moore@hks.harvard.edu

Public Value Accounting: Establishing the Philosophical Basis 465

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 74, Iss. 4, pp. 465–477. © 2014 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.12198.

Mark H. Moore

Harvard University

Questions of how best to def‌i ne the ends, justify the

means, and measure the performance of governments

have preoccupied political economists for centuries.

Recently, the concept of public value—def‌i ned in terms

of the many dimensions of value that a democratic public

might want to see produced by and ref‌l ected in the per-

formance of government—has been proposed as an alter-

native approach.  is article develops three philosophical

claims central to the practice of public value accounting:

(1) when the collectively owned assets of government are

being deployed, the appropriate arbiter of public value

is the collectively def‌i ned values of a “public” called into

existence and made articulate through the quite imperfect

processes of democratic governance; (2) the collectively

owned assets include not only government money but also

the authority of the state; (3) the normative framework

for assessing the value of government production relies

on both utilitarian and deontological philosophical

frameworks.

From Rhetoric to Substantive Challenge

My research on the idea of “public value” began in

the early 1990s. It was a time when the techniques of

private managers, such as focusing on customers and

using quantitative performance measures, were being

pressed on government managers as keys to improving

performance (Osborne and Gaebler 1993).

The Rhetorical Idea

 e idea drew on a simple analogy: if private manag-

ers were committed to using their imagination and

skills to produce private value for shareholders using

private assets, then public managers should use their

imagination and skills to produce public value for citi-

zens using the public assets held

by democratic governments.

Following this logic, I con-

sidered that perhaps the most

important private sector idea for

public managers to embrace was

the idea that they should earn

their keep by creating public

value (Moore 1995).

To claim that government and its managers existed

to create public value sounded odd when govern-

ment was being described as “the problem rather

than the solution.” At the time, even those who

counted themselves as friends of government tended

to see government as a kind of neutral referee that

could order relationships and regulate conf‌l ict in

society rather than as a creator of substantive value

(Friedman 1996).  e assertion that government

and its managers could stand alongside the private

sector and its managers as producers of real material

value for individuals in society, though far from new,

seemed to run counter to the prevailing assumptions.

Despite the reigning skepticism, however, citizens of

democracies and their elected representatives continued

to spend money on governmental activities.1  ey also

continued to grant the government the authority to

regulate their conduct in many private spheres, from

environmental protection to restrictions on the sale of

alcohol and tobacco to the protection of voting rights.

It also remained true that democratic governments,

eager to build legitimacy for the choices they made,

often created forums within which citizens could discuss

the social conditions in which they lived and debate

whether and how they might act collectively to change

those conditions.2 It followed logically and behaviorally

that citizens had to believe that government was produc-

ing something of value to them as citizens—something

that could be described (and, ideally, recognized through

performance measurement) as “public value.”

Others had long defended the view that government

created public value using other words. But this sim-

ple concept, once articulated,

posed a useful challenge to the

prevailing political discourse.

 e word value implicitly

rejected neoliberal ideas that

sought to limit government’s

concerns to technical ef‌f orts to

counter various forms of market

Public Value Accounting: Establishing

the Philosophical Basis

 e word value implicitly

rejected neoliberal ideas that

sought to limit government’s

concerns to technical ef‌f orts to

counter various forms of market

failure.