Measuring the Public Value of Participation and the Public Value of PV Measurement

Osborne (2017) recently stated that “the creation of value/public value in public services delivery” represents one of “the themes that may well come to dominate in the future.” The concept of public value sees increased use in practice and research, with its main contribution resting on interrogating the means of creating and upholding relationships of legitimacy concerning governmental action (but also other sectors). The tools and mechanisms proposed in the public value literature belong, on the one hand, to a managerial dimension focusing on strengthening process and outcome legitimacy through increases in efficiency, targeting of delivery and the range of available delivery mechanisms including collaboration and co-creation, as well as improved measurement of process, output and outcome (Moore 1995, Bozeman 2000, Kelly et al. 2002, Cole & Parston 2006, Stoker 2006, Norman 2012, Bryson et al. 2014). On the other hand, tools and mechanisms in the context of a governance dimension are being proposed. These approaches, often building on the study of values (plural), focus mainly on strengthening input and process legitimacy through a range of approaches and with quite differing aspirations – from expert-based service user preference and satisfaction surveys through “networks of deliberation” for “negotiated goal setting and oversight” (Stoker 2006) and a wider range of citizen and stakeholder representation and participation (Benington 2015, Ventriss et al. 2019) up to “calling a public into existence” (Moore 2013, 2014) and a long-term democratising transformation resting on citizen empowerment and a stronger focus on citizens‘ rights. For both of these dimensions, the means of conceptualizing – i.e. measuring, appraising, evaluating and communicating – public value seems to be critical. We argue that scholars needs to be more explicit about the chosen approach and its implications for measurement; more clarity in this regard will help to develop better tools and models for the respective fields of research. The challenge of designing useful tools lies in the requirement of being flexible and sensitive enough to be applicable to local contexts, yet enabling a certain measure of normative standardization (Horniak et al. 2018), comparability and commensurability. In this section, theoretical as well as empirical contributions addressing the following (and related) questions are welcome: • What are the theoretical and empirical relationships between input and output/outcome legitimacy? • What experience with measuring and communicating outputs vs. outcomes is there – and specifically with the involvement of the public in measurement/appraisal? • What experience with participatory measurement of public value is there? • What is the public value of public value measurement and communication? • To what extent is public value measurement and communication a discursive shaping of the public values along which the performance of the government is going to be judged? • What are the legitimacy and accountability challenges of calling a public into existence? • What is the experience with public value initiatives aiming towards citizen empowerment? • What can be gained from combining the different approaches of public value measurement (input, output/outcome, values)?