Some Optimism About Public Governance

• Date: 01 November 2021
• Published date: 01 November 2021
• DOI: 10.1177/00953997211053501
• Subject Matter: Perspectives

https://doi.org/10.1177/00953997211053501

Administration & Society

2021, Vol. 53(10) 1624 –1630

© The Author(s) 2021

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DOI: 10.1177/00953997211053501

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Perspectives

Some Optimism About

Public Governance

B. Guy Peters1

I am very pleased that Mark Prebble chose to label me as an optimist con-

cerning the capacity of governments to make and implement public policy. It

is all too easy to identify failures, and to bemoan policy designs that appear

ineffective and inefficient. The implementation literature in particular has

been built on the identification of failures, and attempts to understand why

policies do not work. What is often ignored, however, is how many successes

there have been, and how the lives of citizens are, in general, better because

of the interventions of the public sector. Is public policy perfect? Of course

not, but neither are other areas of human activity. Our judgment may be

flawed and our abilities inadequate, but we do keep on trying to improve.

Mark Prebble has presented an intriguing argument about the difficulties,

or even impossibility, of measuring public value or the public interest. This

lack of adequate measurement, in turn, is argued to produce a glaring absence

of any justification for the public sector intervening in the economy or soci-

ety. While I would agree that the concept of “public value” is vague and

perhaps unknowable, and represents a rather thin justification for public

action, I have concerns about the implications of those observations in

Prebble’s essay. If we cannot “know” either the way in which the society for

whom policy is being made will evaluate the policy outcomes, or the conse-

quences of our policy interventions, how can we govern? How do we justify

the public sector extracting resources from society and using them to create

“public value” when the actors involved cannot measure public value?

This argument clearly has two components. In this essay I will focus on

the second part, that is, the cause and effect relationship for policy choices. I

will return to that aspect of the argument, but at this point will make a few

points about the “knowability” of the public valuations of policy. Perhaps the

1University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

Corresponding Author:

B. Guy Peters, Department of Political Science, University of Pittsburgh, 4812 Posvar Hall,

Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA.

Email: bgpeters@pitt.edu

1053501AAS0010.1177/00953997211053501Administration & SocietyPeters

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