Governments and nonprofits exist to create public value. Yet what does that mean in theory and practice? This new volume brings together key experts in the field to offer unique, wide-ranging answers. From the United States, Europe, and Australia, the contributors focus on the creation, meaning, measurement, and assessment of public value in a world where government, nonprofit organizations, business, and citizens all have roles in the public sphere. In so doing, they demonstrate the intimate link between ideas of public value and public values and the ways scholars theorize and measure them. They also add to ongoing debates over what public value might mean, the nature of the most important public values, and how we can practically apply these values. The collection concludes with an extensive research and practice agenda conceived to further the field and mainstream its ideas. Aimed at scholars, students, and stakeholders ranging from business and government to nonprofits and activist groups, Public Value and Public Administration is an essential blueprint for those interested in creating public value to advance the common good.

Building on the previous report, this report examines how governments can move from a tactical to a holistic approach to system change. Drawing on diverse case studies from across the world at both national and local levels, the report illustrates how a strategic approach to system change implies three key elements: envisioning and acting on the future, putting public value at the core of the change process, and systematically engaging citizens in decision-making.

Over the last 10 years, the concept of value has emerged in both business and public life as part of an important process of measuring, benchmarking, and assuring the resources we invest and the outcomes we generate from our activities. In the context of public life, value is an important measure on the contribution to business and social good of activities for which strict financial measures are either inappropriate or fundamentally unsound. A systematic, interdisciplinary examination of public value is necessary to establish an essential definition and up-to-date picture of the field. In reflecting on the ‘public value project’, this book points to how the field has broadened well beyond its original focus on public sector management; has deepened in terms of the development of the analytical concepts and frameworks that linked the concepts together; and has been applied increasingly in concrete circumstances by academics, consultants, and practitioners. This book covers three main topics; deepening and enriching the theory of creating public value, broadening the theory and practice of creating public value to voluntary and commercial organisations and collaborative networks, and the challenge and opportunity that the concept of public value poses to social science and universities. Collectively, it offers new ways of looking at public and social assets against a backdrop of increasing financial pressure; new insights into changing social attitudes and perceptions of value; and new models for increasingly complicated collaborative forms of service delivery, involving public, private, and not-for-profit players.

The ninth edition of Public Administration: Understanding Management, Politics, and Law in the Public Sector grounds students in the fundamentals of public administration while embracing its complexity. It describes, explains, and analyzes public administration through the lenses of three well-established perspectives: management, politics, and law. In addition to thoroughly refreshed examples and case studies, significant updates to this new edition include the following: The discussion of management has been collapsed into a single category, contemporary public management, to better reflect the blending of traditional/orthodox and new public management approaches in the field. Significant changes to federal administration initiated by the Trump administration, the emergence of "hyper-" partisanship, major court decisions affecting public administration, and newer scholarship and foci in public administration. A thoroughly rewritten chapter on budgeting and public finance. New public governance material is incorporated throughout the book, including collaborative models for coordinating administration with private organizations, particularly nonprofits. Additional attention is paid to public participation in public administration, including public administration's potential contribution to strengthening democratic citizenship. Thorough discussion of the latest managerial techniques and concepts as well as the contemporary performance orientation in the public sector. Downloadable instructor support materials including Key Points, Discussion and/or Test Questions, Multiple Choice Questions, True or False Questions, and an Answer Key to accompany each chapter in the book. Together these revisions reinvigorate the book yet retain its core structure, ideas, and familiarity for students and instructors alike. While the new edition retains its focus on the U.S. context, the focus on managerial, legislative, and judicial functions lends itself well to public administration in many developed nations, making the book a popular choice with instructors around the globe. This time-tested and fully up-to-date textbook is required reading for all students of public administration, public management, and nonprofit management.

This comprehensive Encyclopedia is an essential reference text for students, scholars and practitioners in public management. Offering a broad and inter-cultural perspective on public management as a field of practice and science, it covers all the most relevant and contemporary terms and concepts, comprising 78 entries written by nearly 100 leading international scholars.

This volume aims to shed light on how public service value is identified, managed, measured and reported. The chapters cover a range of topics, including theoretical reflections, practical case studies and empirical observations aimed at understanding the concept of public value.

Widespread crisis-events such as pandemics can impose an immense strain on societies’ multi-stakeholder efforts to preserve and sustain the mechanisms of public value (PV) creation. The global coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic exemplifies this because it has pushed civil society, public managers, politicians, and society-at-large into uncharted waters, and at times brought them under exceptional duress. Then how can public value’s agents attempt to conceive, create, and preserve value under such disruptive circumstances? How could public value theory’s (PVT’s) theoretical precepts be informed by the pandemic? This book seeks to inform the PVT literature by drawing upon interesting lenses that have emerged in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. It addresses PVT’s notions of value conflicts, post-Truth politics, multilateral PV, nationalism and the public, comparative PV creation, and PV in developing-country contexts, in order to construct a multi-stakeholder and internationally informed set of analyses on public value’s systems and agents in uniquely distressing circumstances such as pandemics. This book will therefore be of use to both academics and practitioners of public administration and public policy, as well as scholars of government, healthcare policy, and economics.

Public value theory has advanced over the past 30 years, but there is a need to extend its boundary outwards into new contexts and update its discourse to reflect new social challenges. We are now trying to create value in a globalized world, with supranational entities, with new international alliances and institutions, in a frightening post-truth era. How can public managers grapple with these emerging realities? This book seeks to provide answers to such public value questions by applying powerful budgeting perspectives. Using case studies of independent budget offices, key fiscal instruments, and leading public value frameworks, this book stands out in its use of budgetary lenses to answer pertinent questions about the multidimensional processes of value creation by and for a wider society. Pushing the debate on public value forward and taking it onto the global stage, the book asks whether public value (and other public administration theories) are applicable beyond the traditional context of the pro-globalization Western liberal democracies in which they were conceived. It does this by exploring the realms of developing countries, supranational entities, and post-Communist societies, among others. Finally, it presents these explorations in light of very recent sociopolitical trends and phenomena, including the growth of civil society, the global financial crisis, the illiberal democracy, and the post-truth era. Tailored to an audience comprising public administration scholars, students of government, budget practitioners, and social scientists interested in contemporary problems of values in society, this book helps to advance public administration thought by extending public value theory into new contexts and relating it to the growing global challenges of public life.

This book provides a framework for understanding the creation of public value in urban environments. The ability of cities to produce value is related to their capacity to generate meaningful resources for city residents and workers that enable them to craft meaningfulness in life and work. Meaningfulness and public value require new ways of leading and developing city governance. This extends to designing inclusive structures and processes for people to grapple with the meanings and values underpinning public value creation. A public value framework demands that city governance goes beyond ordinary government to considerations of how to involve city residents and workers in creating and maintaining the common good. The common good is determined by an inclusive associational life characterized by deliberative processes and opportunities for social contribution. When acting upon their entitlements to make the city, urban residents and workers – as members of diverse civic, public and private organizations – co-create the meanings that facilitate the collective action necessary to translate values into value. The experience of cooperating for the common good produces meanings that people can adopt into a sense that their lives have significance and purpose. This is particularly relevant to understanding how to motivate just and inclusive sustainability transitions, especially as cities recover from the Covid-19 pandemic. Focusing on cities and urban policy, the main theme of this book is to elaborate on public values for cities and city policies, and to further develop the concept of the meaningful city. This book aims to provide new kinds of tools for city development that can help them co-create resilience against future shocks.