governance from a public value perspective

Governance from a PublicValue Perspective:

P R O P O S I N G A R E S E A R C H A G E N D A

The Utility of Public Value ManagementParadigm for Developing Country Context.

Public Policy in Africa Initiative

Powering the Africa Economy

Governance from a Public value perspective: The utility of public value managementparadigm for developing country context - Proposing a research agenda2

Author:

James Origa,

Water / Sanitation Services and Public Policy Professional.

Email: [email protected] T: +254724052620

P.O Box 2542724052620-00200 Nairobi

Physical Address: c/o World Bank Kenya offices, Delta Centre, Menengai Road, Nairobi

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarely

reflect the views of the editorial advisers or The Public Policy in Africa Initiative.

We wish to thank the following reviewers for their insightful and valuable remarks

and comments.

Matsepang Sekhokoane,MBA Organizational Leadership (Walden University, USA) and

Katia Derbilova,Mphil Economic and Social History (University of Oxford, England)

Governance From a PublicValue Perspective: The utility of public value managementparadigm for developing countrycontext – Proposing a research agenda

Governance from a Public value perspective: The utility of public value management paradigm for developing country context - Proposing a research agenda3

This article presents a review of the emerging understanding of governance and public sector management

from a public value paradigm and elucidates the challenges of its applicability in a developing country context.

Based on a literature review of the evolution of public management from Woodrow Wilson’s politics-adminis-

tration dichotomy, Weberian bureaucratic public service as well as the neo-liberal theories of public manage-

ment, the article proposes research agenda that would allow us to deepen our understanding of public value

management including focusing attention on how public agency managers understand and appreciate the

public value inherent in the public services they manage. The article concludes by outlining possible future

research questions related to the relevance of public value management in developing country context.

1. Introduction

The foundations of modern-day public sector management reforms can be traced to the 1880s article, “The

study of Public administration” by Woodrow Wilson – widely regarded as the “father of public administration”.

Wilson postulated a dichotomy of Politics and Administration asserting that public administration must be

separated from politics on the premise that politicians are policymakers and the public administrators are im-

plementers of the policy (Wilson,1887).Following on the footsteps of Wilson, Max Weber came up with the prin-

ciples of bureaucratic civil service, in the early 19th century. The impacts of the Weberian public administration

discourses has remained the most enduring in development of public administration systems. The Weberian

public administration champions organization of government based on adherence to the hierarchy of authori-

ty and standardization of administrative services.

Evolving from the Wilson and Weber foundations, the 1970s and 1980s saw a transition from public administra-

tion to a new concept of public management. During this period, a new paradigm - New Public Management

(NPM) – emerged as a theory of public administration. NPM asserted that public managers should not hide

behind the impersonal veils of organizational hierarchy and fidelity to standardization but should take individ-

ual responsibilities for delivering results. It advocated for managerialism in government, making a distinction

that a Public Administrator is someone who just follows the rules to the letter and carries instructions given by

someone else (the politicians) while a public manager is personally responsible for the achievement of results

Abstract


2. Research Question

In majority African countries, the post-colonial history of a bureaucratic, hierarchical public administration has

created a strong patron-client relation-oriented design and delivery of public services. The emphasis has been

placed more on upward accountability of public managers to political policy makers and less on accountability

towards citizens and public value creation from the citizen’s perspective. The persistent problem facing public

managers in Africa today is how to design and deliver services that create public value and command legiti-

macy from the citizens and not just politicians.

(Hughes, 2003). While the proponents of NPM saw it as an answer to the lack of discretion and indi-

vidual responsibility of the old bureaucratic way of public management, its opponents claimed that

it resulted in a loss of organizational responsiveness to citizens as service users due to its emphasis

on economic efficiency. Moreover, the NPM theory has encountered enduring conflicts with populist

preferences about the provision of public services (Blaug, Horner, & Lekhi, 2006). The opponents assert

that the managerialism promoted in the NPM emphasizing technical efficiency over democratic and

social values inherent in public services goes against the spirit of the Social contract that underlies the

existence of a government. Dissatisfied by these perceived failures and apparent weaknesses of NPM

theory, a new paradigm emerged – the New Public Service (NPS) theory – instead placing emphasis

not only on efficient delivery of services but on how citizens feel about the services, their delivery pro-

cesses and their outcomes (O ’Flynn, 2007).

In recent times, a new concept in public administration the – Public value management (PVM) has

been introduced as a variant of NPS theory. Some authors suggest that its emphasis goes beyond

meeting centrally driven performance targets set by politically leaning public administrators and calls

for more well-rounded downward accountability towards citizens (Blaug, Horner, & Lekhi, 2006). This

emerging debate is driven by the enduring tensions between citizenship rights and market-efficien-

cy driven managerialism. King & Stivers (1998) argued that public managers should see citizens as

unalienable right-holders and not merely as clients or customers with choices. Castigated the NPM’s

focus on efficiency, they posited that public managers should seek to be more responsive to societal

needs so as to build trust with the citizens as well as organizational legitimacy. Hefetz & Warner (2004)

argued that public management should go beyond just delivering services but enshrine deeper gov-

ernance values in the society. They observed that social values inherent in public services may not be

adequately addressed by the economic efficiency calculations of markets.


3. Key aspects of public value management3.1 What is public value management all about?

Harvard University professor Mark More has been credited with the introduction of the concept of Public Value

Management (PVM) which he described in detail in his seminal book Creating Public Value: Strategic man-

agement in Government (Moore, 1995). Since then, Public Value Management (PVM) has grown into an emerg-

ing paradigm in public administration and which is also used as a practical tool applied across different devel-

oped countries mainly the United Kingdom (UK) and Australia. Alford & Hughes (2008) describe two themes

that have emerged in public administration beyond the classical public administration, Weberian bureaucracy

and the NPM. The first one is a cooperation theme that advances theories such as network governance,

collaborative government, Public-Private Partnerships, joined-up government and One Stop Shops aimed at

enabling citizens’ seamless rather than fragmented access to government services. The second one is a results

theme which aims to go beyond just achieving output and considers the ultimate outcomes of government

services. Placing PVM in the results theme, they theorize it as a pragmatic model of management where orga-

nizations are open to the utilization of any of a variety of means to achieve purposes with the choices focused

on what is most context-appropriate and consistent with values at hand. The argument they provide is that

PVM’s pragmatism offers more than just one-best way of doing something which was prevalent in classical

public administration and the NPM.

O ‘Flynn (2007) defines public value as a collectively expressed preference of the citizens created not just

through outcomes but also through processes which may generate trust or fairness. Horner & Hazel (2005)

contrast public value and shareholder value in the private sector. They think of citizens as shareholders in how

tax is allocated. The shareholder value from the perspective of tax-paying citizens is economic prosperity, social

cohesion and diminished social problems. According to Kelly, Mulgan, & Muers (2002), public value refers to

value created by the government through services, laws, regulations and other actions. .

While the emergent Public value management discourse as a “new” paradigm in public administra-

tion is well advanced in the more egalitarian developed countries, much remains to be done to empir-

ically test these conceptual and normative theories particularly in a developing country context. This

article reviews the existing literature on public management and outlines the stages in the develop-

ment of the concept of public value. It concludes by making remarks and proposing specific research

questions that derive from the literature review.


3.2 The Promise of Public Value Management

The Public Value treatise visions a public administration where the public manager is pragmatic and flexible,

considers context, sustainability and acceptability of choices and has a capacity to create value for multiple

stakeholders across multiple performance dimensions (Conteh et al.,2014). Douglas (2016) summarization of

Public value management emphasizes that public managers should seize opportunities that create socially

desirable outcomes, mobilize external partners including citizens in design and delivery of public services and

open up the government to the community.

Amongst a plethora of tools and doctrines that have been presented by different authors as central to the prac-

tice of public value management, what persists is the public value strategic triangle (Alford, Douglas, Geuijen,

& Hart, 2016,).Moore (1995) posits that the most critical features of effective public management are defining

the public value inherent in a public service and championing the involvement of stakeholders who forms

the authorizing environment for public managers. He brings these three items together into what he calls the

strategic triangle, which forms the basis of his public value management paradigm. Public value is created

insofar as the relations between these three elements are operationally and administratively feasible (Moore,

1995). Douglas (2016) views the strategic triangle as more of a normative or prescriptive framework concluding

that paying attention to the three points of the triangle and their degree of alignment leads to a more effective

management.

Stocker (2006) argues that the strength of PVM is its redefinition of the challenges of how to provide

efficiency, accountability and equity. PVM does this by ensuring that managers need to find a com-

mon ground with citizens on what constitutes value in the services offered by public organizations.

Figure 1. Public value management strategictriangle

Source: Moore, 2013

Legitimacyand Support

Operational Capacity

Public Value


4. Political Economy Context Matters Most

The strategic triangle is centered on the idea of an enterprising and pragmatic public manager. Aucon (1995)

gives a sharp criticism of this “action approach” to management that promises to liberate management efforts

from political decision-making structures. He instead, theorizes the supremacy of societal structures in defin-

ing action of managers. His assertation is that the focus should be more on the design of polycentric inclusive

decision-making systems than promoting individual action of managers. Feldman & Khademian (2001) agree

with Aucon that public managers’ action can either be constrained or enabled by the prevailing authorizing

political environment. Moore’s response to this criticism is that public value management focuses on the

‘bottom line’ or the ultimate performance outcome rather than just the process of achieving success (Moore,

2013). The question that persists is whether the process matters more or are citizens, as service users, more con-

cerned with the bottom-line performance output of those processes.

These questions are particularly critical in the context of developing post-colonial countries which have a

history of bureaucratic clientelism and patronage in deciding the goals public agencies should pursue and

how they should go about pursing them. Douglas (2016) formulates three hypotheses on the potential impact

of PVM practices on developing countries. First is that under the guise of public value leadership, public man-

agers could turn the agency into their personal network of patronage or alternatively the will and skills of an

entrepreneurial public manager can eliminate the bondages of patronage and clientelism in service delivery

prevalent in such contexts. Second, active stakeholder engagement could lead to two possible outcomes:1) fur-

ther intertwine agency governance and patronage; 2) more mobilization of resources, support and legitimacy.

Finally, openness and transparency brought about by information sharing could either lead to further confu-

sion, disorder and dissent in the society or improve expectations and encourage cooperative behaviour from

the external partners.

The first element in the strategic triangle, ‘public value’, implies that public managers should develop

and present a clear value proposition articulating how their organization will meet public aspirations,

concerns, procedural norms and the societal values associated with good governance. The second

element, ‘Legitimacy and Support’, requires that managers need to engage with many other actors

whose support can provide them with the go-ahead and resources to operationalize their public value

proposition. The third element, ‘Operational Capacity’, posits that it’s no good articulating a public val-

ue proposition and getting support for its execution if the public manager cannot muster the organi-

zational capacity required to deliver on it. This element requires that public managers align resources,

people and processes to the task at hand as well as to the broader value chain which their organiza-

tions belong to (Alford, Douglas, Geuijen, & Hart, 2016). By putting these three elements into coher-

ence, the tool can maximize the value to be created by the public agencies, subject to the constraints

of the authorizing environment and the operational capabilities (Alford, Douglas, Geuijen & Hart, 2016).


5. Developing Country Perspective: The example of Kenya’s PublicAdministration

From the outset of independence, the Kenyan public administration has been strategically centrally placed

within the office of the President to the extent that civil servants served at the pleasure of the president

(Aketch, J. M. Migai, 2010). The regimes of Kenya’s first president Jomo Kenyatta and his successor president

Daniel Moi entrenched a public service based on a patron-client ideology where recruitment of key positions

in the public service was reserved for those who were closely related either to the president personally or to his

close confidants. Since accountability was only upwards to the president, there was no transparency in setting

policies and delivering services and the ensuing result was a loss of public value depicted through a rapid de-

cline in standards of provision of public services and economic growth (Mbai, 2003).the external partners.

This cronyism and ethnic clientelism led to a loss of trust from citizens and undermined the legitimacy of the

public administration. Such a situation necessitated much needed public-sector reforms. Obong’o (2009) clas-

sifies systematically planned civil service reforms in Kenya in two generations. The first generation of reforms

under former President Daniel Moi was focused on reforms aimed at achieving economic austerity as a set

condition for receiving development aid through the structural adjustment programs initiated by the World

Bank in the 1980s. These included reducing expenditures on social services as well as privatization of state-

owned enterprises with the aim of enhancing their efficiency in delivery.

One can observe that the key characteristics in developed countries include the existence of a stable

and relatively effective service delivery system supported by relatively good and effective infrastruc-

ture, technology and information systems. Post-colonial developing African countries, on the other

hand, are characterized by chronic political instability, a tendency towards bureaucratic authoritarian

rule, politically controlled bureaucracy as well as preference for vote-maximizing policies. Field (2003)

observes that the patterns of relationships dominant in a society replicate themselves into the govern-

ment sphere and provides a critical background to understanding the influence of contextual factors

on public management. Several studies point out that the institutional, social and economic context

of a society influence public management practices. Based on this, Douglas (2016) raises the question

whether the balance between the three elements of the strategic triangle that leads to effective man-

agement and maximum public value creation works in developing countries with patterns of relations

dramatically different from those in the developed countries.


6. A sectoral Perspective of Public Value Management – GoverningPublic Water Services

Bozeman (2007) postulates that any public intervention is legitimized by a match between the activities of

public organizations and the public value the society recognizes in those activities. It follows then that ulti-

mately, it’s the citizens’ conceptualization of public value in a service that will determine the best approach of

providing that service. O ‘Flynn (2005) proposes that based on a good understanding of citizens’ valuation and

recognition of public value, it’s possible to assess which management structure will work best under what cir-

cumstances. Conteh et all (2014) argues that future debates on the management of water services should be

beyond contra positioning public versus private management but should take into consideration the prefer-

ences and potential contributions of different actors. This position is affirmed by Marie, (2016) who establishes

a shifting of urban water services management from the hitherto successful private operators back to munici-

pality-owned utilities in France.

Moorhouse (2011); Marie (2016) and Bozeman (2007) observe that the public value of water tends to be specific

to contexts and thus not entirely generalizable across geographical and social contexts. Douglas (2016) recom-

mends that research that maps out and tracks the likely contests, debates and arguments between different

and among different stakeholders about what constitutes public value will be helpful.

Marie (2016) mapping out of a comprehensive array of 15 intrinsic public values of water is critical for identifying

the public value of water. She classifies these values either as belonging to the public sphere, private or individ-

ual spheres. Table 1 shows the mapping of 33 public values of water services

The second generation of reforms started from 2002 Under former President Mwai Kibaki with the

launch of Economic Recovery Strategy for Wealth Creation and subsequently the Kenya vision 2030.

Elected on a platform of change and sustained economic growth, the new government shifted the

public administration into a managerial focus seeking urgent delivery of results for Kenyans (GOK-ERS,

2004). The new government introduced Result Based Management and performance contracting not

only to improve service delivery but also refocus the mindset of public servants away from a culture of

inward-looking towards a culture of business focused on customers and results (Obong’o, 2009).

The latest phase of public administration reforms in Kenya was introduced by the new Kenyan Consti-

tution enacted in 2010. The new constitution introduced a value perspective of public services empha-

sizing the responsibility of the public service to provide services at a prescribed standard of profession-

alism and ethics by clearly defining certain public service values that all state organs should aspire to

(Constitution of Kenya, 2010).


7. Conclusion: Proposing a Research Agenda

Moore’s strategic triangle appears more as a normative and prescriptive framework for public management

which is yet to be fully empirically tested. Studies to test whether the strategic triangle, presented as the key

tool of public value management has any practical impact on the actions and behaviours of public managers

should then be explored. The literature surveyed points to a high degree of adoption of public value manage-

ment principles in the more developed countries such as the US, UK and Australia. These countries have a

distinctively different social, economic and cultural context from poorer developing countries. This context dif-

ferentiation has a profound effect on how the government offers services and how citizens perceive the value

of government services. Few studies have presented empirical studies on public value management practices

in developing countries. This presents a research gap that could be explored.

Such a study would question whether public value management as a “new” paradigm in public administra-

tion well developed in egalitarian high trust developed countries like the USA, UK and Australia is applicable in

a non-egalitarian post-colonial hierarchical developing country like Kenya.

Source: Moore, 2016

Table 1: Public values of water services

Sphere of value Corresponding public value related to water ser-

vices

Public sphere Transparency

User participation prior to decision making; Perti-

nence and fairness of decisions; Solidarity; Pro-

tection of basic human right; Social justice; Equal

access to service; Equality of treatment; Respect

for the other; Public health

Close relations with users; Pertinence and fair-

ness of investment decisions; Long-term vision;

Ecological exemplariness;

Market sphere Water is not free, but the price must be limited;

Organizational efficiency; Users and managers

both develop a sense of economic responsibility

Individual sphere Water taste


Probable research questions would include; Is there a significant difference in the conceptualization

and understanding of public value management between public managers in egalitarian western

countries and hierarchical developing countries? How do citizens in developing countries conceptual-

ize public value in different public services (e.g. water services) and what value do they want from such

services? How does this compare to western developed countries? How does public value concepts

shape the behavior and actions of public managers? What is required to develop a framework inte-

grating public value creation within results‐based management for the public sector in Africa?

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