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Ideas in Public Management Reform for the 2010s. Digitalization, Value Creation and Involvement

Carsten Greve

Published online: 6 November 2013 # Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013

Abstract The purpose of this paper is to discuss the three key ideas for an agenda for the public sector that are emerging as dominant ideas in the 2010’s in the literature on public organizations. The paper examines a select number of self-styled conceptual alternatives from the literature on public management to what has been the dominant paradigm in recent years, the New Public Management (NPM). “Self-styled” means that they explicitly present themselves as alternatives to NPM and address the shortcomings in NPM to promote alternative conceptualizations. They include Digital-Era Governance, Public Value Management (PVM), Collaborative Governance, also known to some as the New Public Governance (NPG). The paper takes each of these as broad categories, and proposes that each shelters sub-categories of ideas. DEG: transparency, social media and shared service centers. PVM: strategy-making, performance governance, and innovation and strategic HRM. NPG: networks and collaboration, public-private partnerships and new ways of engaging active citizens. The paper sees these ideas as competing for dominance in the public organization literature as they are new drivers for reforms. Together they form the building blocks of how public management reforms can be build. The paper also recognizes that there are disagreements between them. The paper suggests that these tensions must be addressed if the reform movement is going to be coherent.

Keywords Public management reform . New public management .

Digital era governance . Public value management . Collaborave governance

Introduction

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the three key ideas for an agenda for the public sector that are emerging as dominant ideas in the 2010’s in the literature on public organizations. The paper develops the point that a coherent agenda for public

Public Organiz Rev (2015) 15:49–65 DOI 10.1007/s11115-013-0253-8

C. Greve (*) Department of Business and Politics, Copenhagen Business School, Steen Blichers Vej 22, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark e-mail: [email protected]

management ideas are in the process of being been built based around digital government, public value creation and collaborative public governance networks. So far these ideas have been discussed in isolation. The paper brings the ideas together, and proceeds to discuss the relationships between the ideas.

The paper examines a select number of self-styled conceptual alternatives from the literature on public management to what has been the dominant paradigm in recent years, the New Public Management (NPM) (Hood 1991; Barzelay 2001; Christensen and Lægreid 2011; OECD 2010a). “Self-styled” means that they explicitly present themselves as alternatives to NPM and address the shortcomings in NPM to promote alternative conceptualizations. During the 2000’s, the public management reform literature became filled with discussions of many types of alternatives to NPM. They include Digital-Era Governance (DEG) (Dunleavy et al. 2006a), Public Value Management (PVM) (Bennington and Moore 2011), Collaborative governance (Donahue and Zeckhauser 2011; O’Leary and Bingham 2009) also known to some as the New Public Governance (NPG) (Osborne 2010). The paper takes each of these as broad categories, and proposes that each shelters other ideas. For DEG it is transparency, social media and shared service centers. For PVM it is strategy-making, performance governance, and innovation and strategic HRM. For NPG it is networks and collaboration, public-private partnerships and new ways of engaging active citizens. There is some overlap as will be demonstrated.

“Ideas” are here understood in the sense of John Campbell (2002, 2004) and others as being cognitive paradigms, worldviews, norms, frames, policy program, a related approach to the discussion on “administrative doctrines” by Hood and Jackson (1991) in public management theory. In Campbell’s vocabulary, the ideas discussed in this paper are mostly policy programs.

The paper sees these ideas as competing for dominance in the public organization literature as they are new drivers for reforms. Together they form the building blocks of how public management reforms can be build. A positive vision is to see the public sector as public value creating, collaborative governance, and digitalization as overlapping. The paper also recognizes that there are disagreements between them. It suggests that these tensions must be addressed if the reform movement is going to be coherent.

This paper is organized as follows: The first section briefly discusses what it takes to study ideas in public management reform. The second section reviews three broad contemporary categories of ideas as policy programs: digital era governance, public value management and new public governance or involvement. The third section discusses the relationship between the three public management ideas, and asks how the new reform agenda is different from NPM. The fourth section concludes the paper.

Studying Ideas in Public Management in the Wake of the Financial Crisis

The study of ideas in public management specifically is influenced by the notion that ideas and interests are closely intertwined. The debate in public management is often closely related to the practice of public management reform practice. Hood developed the idea of NPM after having observed the Australian and New Zealand radical experiments at close hand in the 1980s. Mark Moore (1995) wrote his book on Creating Public Value after having been academic director of the executive program

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for public managers at the Kennedy school of Government at Harvard University in the 1990’s. Patrick Dunleavy and colleagues (2006b) were engaged in a comparative empirical study of e-government after which they came up with the concept of “digital era governance” in the 2000’s.

What about the financial crisis? Is that going to set a whole new agenda that makes all other concept obsolete? While there is no denying the seriousness of the crisis in certain countries, there is little evidence to suggest that public management ideas will be unable to coming to terms with understanding the financial crisis (Peters et al. 2011). Hood (2010) has suggested three types of answers: system redesign, business and usual and “east of Suez-type” of solutions. The first one leads to consideration of a more fundamental redesign of the structure and processes of public services. The second one is about reforming even more along the lines that have been undertaken already. The third one is the more radical one and suggests that hard priorities will have to be made, and some areas of responsibility may be transferred to the private sector. I would refer to these different strategies as “cut back, cut circumvention and cut loose”. To some comfort, the public sector actually has experience in dealing with cuts. Not only has being under pressure been a key issue of many OECD arguments for reform (see for example OECD 2010b). But there was also previously a large literature on “cutback management” which is currently being revisited by many scholars. So while it is not suggested that the financial crisis as such is easily manageable, it is suggested that there are ideas around the deal with austerity management so we don’t have to invent new ones.

The following review will present a number of candidates for recent ideas. Not all ideas can be included for questions of space. The idea of Public Service Motivation (PSM), for example, is a rich and growing field of research these years and is becoming a whole research area of its own. If it was to be included here, it would be categorize it under the broader creating public value management framework or involvement, but there are bound to researchers who would disagree with that. Sustainable public management (SPM) is yet another growing field that may have wide implications in time. Also not included here are broader discussions on feminism, ethics or personal leadership.

Digitalization and Transparency

Information technology (IT) had played a part in the early NPM thinking, but always as one element out of several elements and was never integrated in the concept as such. New technologies develop all the time, as we know, and in the 1990’s the internet and the web was a major innovation which eventually also affected the institutions of public management and governance. Patrick Dunleavy and colleagues from the London School of Economics and Political Science began in the 2000’s to view digitalization or “e-government” as something more profound than just a supportive tool for the New Public Management or the institutionalization of IT-technologies (see also Fountain 2001). They wrote articles, including one prominent article where the headline was: “New Public Management Is Dead—Long Live Digital Era Governance” (Dunleavy et al. 2006a). A book on Digital Era Governance with comparative experiences with e- government around the world soon followed (Dunleavy et al. 2006b).

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For Dunleavy et al., digitalization is about to replace NPM as the dominant doctrine or paradigm in public management and governance. Dunleavy et al. declare that NPM had run its course and that different NPM elements were being halted or were backtracking fast. Instead, they saw DEG as the main alternative and characterized it as being composed of three elements (Dunleavy et al. 2006a: Table 2):

& “Reintegration including roll back of agencies, joined-up governance, re- governmentalization, reinstating central processes, radically squeezing production costs, re-engineering back office functions, procurement concentration and specialization and network simplification

& Needs-based holism including client-based or need-based reorganization, one-stop provision, interactive and ask-once information seeking, data warehousing, end-to- end service re-engineering, agile government processes

& “Digitazation” processes including electronic service delivery, new forms of automated processes, radical disintermediation, active channel streaming, facilitating isocratic administration and co-production, moving toward open-book government”

In later discussions, Dunleavy and colleagues have contended that there might already be a DEG version 2.0. that is more sensitive to the social media (Margetts 2010, see also Mergel 2012). The following three issues are inherent in the digitalization agenda: transparency, social media and shared service centres.

Transparency Transparency has become the key concept that many governments strive for. Transparency according to the OECD is “that the government’s actions, and the individuals responsible for those actions, will be exposed to public scrutiny and challenge” (OECD 2005: 29). OECD in their 2005-report treated transparency as one element of “open government”, with two other elements: accessibility and responsiveness. There is a normative argument for open government according to OECD: “As a system of government, democracy rests upon the informed consent of citizens and their ability to exercise control over those who wield authority on their behalf. Open government strengthens democracy by providing a bulwark against misgovernment, by exposing abuse of power, by offering greater protection to minorities through equal rights of citizenship and providing greater opportunity for public participation” (OECD 2005: 32). Transparency has been called the best way to disaffect public life and electricity the best policeman (Brandeis) . Transparency is enhancing accountable government according to Hood and Heald (2006). Transparency can understood in an event and a process way. There are generally three broad recent approaches to transparency. First, there is movement that emphasizes open access to government information through freedom of information acts (FOIA), and the public’s right to know about the activities of government. The institutionalized press usually sees itself as acting on behalf of the public in getting information. Most countries now have FOIA acts in place according to OECD. Second, there is a recent movement towards what Archon Fung of Harvard and colleagues have termed “targeted transparency” (Fung et al. 2007). This means transparency in connection with specific policy fields or programs, for example release on hospital data or teaching quality in high schools. This movement is close intertwined with the performance-based

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management and the subsequent need for performance information that can be a basis for later evaluations and audits. Third, there is movement towards release of datasets to the public through sites like USAspending.gov or data.gov. The idea here is that governments can now release huge datasets, and make them available on the internet, and present them in graphical and searchable ways. The website recovery.gov is a prime example of how data on budget spending is made easily trackable and presentable. The Obama administration in the US has spearheaded this movement. On his first data in office, President Obama has promoted a government that is to be defined by “transparency, participation and collaboration” (Obama 2009) (see also Coglianese 2009; Kamensky 2010, 2011).

On President Obama’s first day in office he issued a circular declaring: “My administration is committed to an unprecedented level of openness in Government. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in government”. Other countries and media have followed suit. In the UK it is the Guardian newspaper that is promoting the open government initiative. OECD (2011) has also taken a lead on this, and has issued a huge report and a call for more information on open government and transparency issues. This revolution will be transparent! Most recently, the issues of Big Data (Mayer-Schönberger and Cuckier 2012) and the Snowdon-affair have raised new questions about how transparency can be enacted in modern governance.

Of course there are critiques and limits to what can be achieved with transparency. Most authors agree that there will always be some balance, and this has been evident in national security issues. There is also the personal protection of individual freedom to take into consideration. Researchers have also argued that governments may find way to undercut or undermine efforts and simply not put decisions and activities into the files (Roberts 2006). While all these issues and considerations exist, it is also important to remember that especially the targeted transparency and the open data oriented transparency are both young phenomenon. They can be viewed in an experimental and explorative perspective rather than aiming for a clear “balance” immediately because that a balance is probably not going to be reached.

Social Media The way social media is working is potentially altering the relationship inside government, between politicians and public managers, and between public managers and the public/citizenry (Landsbergen and Park 2011; Mergel 2012). New tools have come to light, including but not limited to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other services. New services are appearing all the time. Imagine that citizens can now be “friends” with an organization or public managers, be linked in with public managers, follow politicians or organizations on twitter etc. There is not a huge literature in public management and public policy itself on these issues, but they are of course being debated and explored in other academic disciplines and also among web enthusiasts themselves. Some public management media has taken up the issue (the journal Public Management in the US is one of them). The message is here: Be ready to be on these new media platforms, but also beware of what you as a public organization or a public manager expect to get out of the social media. A few issues come to mind: There can be a more democratic dialogue on new and important issues. Dialogue can flow more freely, and the physical town hall meeting is becoming less important. The government can use “crowd sourcing” as a way to get input to new

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policies and new managerial initiatives. The government can call on user-driven innovation proposals for policies to better formulated and implemented. Real-time data can help the government transform.

Shared Service Centers A shared service center is one of the key ways to achieve the more efficient and effective government, often promised by digital era governance. The principle is about connecting data power in large “call-centers” and to use to economics of scale of achieve efficiency, see also the “Big Data” issue mentioned above. The practice is for governments to recentralize many tasks that were previously delegated to individual organizations. The NPM movement had called for decentralization of management responsibility and managers often needed their own data close at hand to be able to make business-like strategic decisions on behalf of their unit. But that became inefficient because data were not collected nor stored in a similar fashion, and therefore often hard to retrieve for aggregate results. There has therefore been a movement towards bringing tasks back to central offices or a small number of shared service centers. The politics of this is quite complex because local units and local managers are not always pleased to give up influence over data collection and data use because they (rightly) fear that it will remove considerable decision making power out of their hands. The perspectives of using more shared services are daunting. First, the government could recentralize and process much more data if it stored them in service centers. For central governments this is huge temptation. Second, there is possible for better cross-data processing so datasets can be checked against each other (for example on cheating with government subsidies). Third, the HRM and the more motivational issues are not clear at all. Who would want to work in the big shared service centers? Are they in sync with how government workers are motivated? And are shared services soon ripe for huge outsourcing or privatization efforts? There is also the current danger that governments (again) can get too big for their own good. As Beryl Radin (2006) reminds us, big data systems and performance data programs often have faults or are incomplete so her advice is not to put too much faith in large data systems. This is not so say that they will not work, but just a word of caution for governments of not getting overexcited.

Value Creation in the Public Sector

A long-time idea has been that management in the public sector is different from management in the private sector, but the tricky part has always been to describe or characterize the important activities that public managers do in terms that could be measurable or recognizable to the outside world also. Building on years’ experience with executive education of public managers at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School, Mark H. Moore (1995) came up with a framework and a concept that seemed to capture what public management was all about. Moore accepted the institutional conditions that public managers were working under and did not set out to establish a theory of institutions as such. Instead he saw that public managers produced service that were valued by politicians and by citizens, and made the analogue to the private sector value creation. His answer was that public managers are engaged in “creating public value”

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(the title of Mark Moore’s 1995-book, see also article by Moore (2000). The concept of “public value creation” began to disseminate from Harvard to the rest of the world, and it was taken up by many schools and institutions that had executive master programs in public administration, management and governance as one of their degrees (Harvard, of course, and ANZSOG and Warwick). PVM was certainly “the next big thing” in the UK for a while under New Labour, and has been prominent in discussions among public service organizations in Australia and New Zealand while many US organizations for obvious reasons (i.e. Moore) have long been thinking along these lines. It resonates with a broader tradition of public stewardship combined with a performance leaning in the US., and it has been a key inspiration for public managers in Australia in recent years

Strategy-Making for Public Value Creation The idea of public value management takes its cue from the creating public value framework that Moore first formulated. Public managers are in “a strategic triangle” between a legitimizing and authorizing environment, an organizing environment in their focus and an environment of results; i.e. efforts to produce results that is, in effect, a value creation process. Since then, a number of scholars have taken up the concept and carried it further. It is a part of Bryson’s (2004) strategic framework and it is the subject of a new book “Public Value” (Bennington and Moore 2011) from the University of Warwick. It is still the basis for almost all teaching in the executive master programs at the John F. Kennedy School and in Australia where the concept was embraced by the Australian and New Zealand School of Government (ANZSOG).

An appraisal of the concept has been written by John Alford and Janine O’Flynn (2007, 2009) from Australia. They criticize NPM and write that:

“More recently, however, cracks have appeared and the search for a new way of thinking, and enacting public management practice has begun, in part to address the supposed weaknesses of NPM. This is unlikely to underpin a return to the bureaucratic model, but rather spark a paradigmatic change which attempts to redefine how we think about the state, its purpose, and thus ways of functioning, operating and managing. Within this search for meaning and direction, a “public value” approach is attracting considerable interest, both in the practitioner and academic circles (…)” (Alford and O’Flynn 2007: 353).

For Alford & O’Flynn, the public value management framework has something different to offer than NPM. NPM is competitive government, PVM is post- competitive, NPM focuses on results, PVM focuses on relationships, NPM defines the public interest as aggregated individual preferences, PVM sees collective preferences as expressed, NPM’s performance objective is managing of inputs and outputs to ensure economy and responsiveness to consumers, PVM sees how multiple objectives are pursued, including service outputs, satisfaction, outcomes, trust and legitimacy, NPM’s accountability is upwards via performance contracts and outwards to customers via market mechanisms, PVM sees multiple accountability systems, NPM’s preferred system of delivery is the private sector or tightly defined arms-

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length public agencies, PVM’s delivery system is a menu of alternatives selected pragmatically.

In PVM, public value creation “is said to rely on the politically-mediated expression of collectively determined preferences, that is, what the citizenry determines is valuable (360), and PVM is also said to be characterized by a new pragmatism as “it requires an ability to weigh up, for example, which governance structures will work best in what circumstances, or which relationship form is most appropriate under what conditions” (Alford and O’Flynn 2007: 362).

Performance Governance Performance management has been around for a long time. Basically it is how politicians and policymakers determine what objectives they want to pursue, and how they document how those results are achieved, thereby providing accountability for their actions (Kettl 2001). Performance management has been emphasizing output and then outcomes, but there is also focus on process performance in some areas. The performance management agenda has been associated with NPM, but a lot of activity has happened in recent years that broaden the outlook. First, there is more focus on long-term outcomes, and also how to balance outputs and outcomes. Second, there is more focus on the different tasks suitable for performance management as public managers get more experienced in using the tools (Van Dooren et al. 2010). Third, performance management is now integrated with the institutional framework and with the wider governance structures which had led to more coherent “theories of performance” (Talbot 2010) and the concept of “performance governance” (Halligan and Bouckaert 2009). Fourth, performance management is closely related to the emphasis on data and realtime data for managing and governing public organizations through concepts like CompStat or CitiStat, and most recently linked to transparency issue (Behn 2007). The Obama administration embraced performance management with its “Peformance.gov”—website and its systematic approach to performance (Kamensky 2011). Fifth, managers and employees may see the advantage in documenting all the good that public managers and their staff are doing. Therefore, performance management can be a tool in the wrong hands for those who want to micromanage and control every aspect, but there is also the possibility that performance management can support broader governance efforts in the public sector. Broader performance criteria are also associated with the many international indexes (Pedersen 2011), see for example the new Better life-index of the OECD launched as part of the OECD’s 50 jubilee (www.oecd.dk/ betterlifeindex.org).

Innovation The innovation agenda can be accommodated in the discussion of public value management as Moore emphasized the strategic and innovative aspects of public management in his writings. Innovation has been a key topic for some time in the public sector. Innovation encourages public managers to be creative and to think out of the box. A definition of innovation is usually that it is presenting or inventing something new that is put into practice. The practice part is important as innovation is not just about fancy ideas that get nowhere. Innovation can be seen at the individual, organizational and societal level. Usually, it is individual innovators in organizations that get praised. Helene Bækmark, a public manager in a Danish local government promoted, an idea of how the elderly people can “stay longer time in their own lives”,

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meaning that elderly people could help themselves more and thereby create a better life for themselves and save the local government a lot money. Innovation and efficiency is combined. Organizations can also be innovative in finding new ways of doing public management activities. The Danish tax authorities (SKAT) have been innovative in how citizens can fill out their tax returns online. SKAT therefore was perceived as an innovative organization. Innovation prizes are common in many countries to highlight how innovation occurs. Innovation can also be found more systematically at the national level. A part of innovation literature is devoted to “national innovation systems”. There are various ways that innovation can be enhanced. One popular way is to establish special innovation units that help other organizations think out of the box. The Danish organization “Mindlab” is such an organization that employs personnel from many places and backgrounds and who initiate innovative projects (www.mind- lab.dk). Innovation in public management is perhaps often associated with the innovations in government program in the Kennedy School of Government in the USA and supported by the Ford foundation. Results from here have been reported in various publications (Borins 2008). One issue in innovation is the difference between innovation conditions in the private sector and in the public sector. In the private sector innovation is a means to achieve competitive advantages in the market place and to help make a profit. In the public sector, innovation is often valued as a means itself, although the end products are also valuable. Innovation in the private sector can lead to patents and to immediate success which can be capitalized if you strike on a particular idea (think about the founder of Facebook). The company in question will reap the immediate benefits. In the public sector, it is not so certain what will happen with an innovative project. The innovator may get a prize, but the whole of the public sector will share the success if they emulate the innovation. Also, it is less certain that a patent can be applied, and there is not necessarily any steep career ladder to be climbed. Conditions are different in the public sector.

Involvement and Partnerships for Public Action

The respected American public administration scholar, Fredericksson (2005) recently asked: “Whatever happened to public administration?” and answered: “governance, governance everywhere” in the Oxford Handbook on Public Management (Ferlie et al. 2005). Governance is the style of relationship between government and civil society (Burger). Governance describes a situation where public services are not just delivered by public organizations, but by a combination of public, non-profit organizations and for-profit organizations in a network-like structure (World Bank 2011).

Networks and Collaboration The governance approach to public management has been present for some time, and gained prominence already in the 1990’s. American scholars O’Leary & Bingham (2008), Agranoff (2007; 2012), McGuire and Agranoff (2011) have all focused on collaborative governance structures change the basic way the public sector work. Donahue and Zeckhauser (2011) summed up much of the discussion in their recent book on “Collaborative Governance”, using Kennedy School

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of Government-case studies as basis for their investigation. Dutch network scholars Klijn and Koppenjan (2004) focused on how managers can deal with uncertainties in networks. The main idea has been neatly described by Mark Consdine in his book on Making Public Policy (2006). In the US, Kamarck (2007) and Donald F. Kettl addressed “the transformation of governance” (2002, 2009). The NPG goes beyond managerialism and markets and takes a more holistic perspective and also recognizes that collaboration is necessary in today’s complex world. Many researchers (Lynn et al. 2003 for example) use the concept of governance or public governance as the starting point when describing relationships between actors in society, including the politicians and public managers. In the view of OECD (2005: 16), “governance refers to the formal and informal arrangements that determine how public are carried out, from the perspective of maintaining a country’s constitutional values in the face of changing problems, actors and environments. Public administration is a constituent pillar of governance”. For the World Bank (website), “governance consists of the traditions and institutions by which governments are selected, monitored and replaced; the capacity of the government to effectively formulate and implement public policies, and the respect of citizens and the state for the institutions that govern economic and social interactions among them”. The World Bank has initiated a worldwide governance project that measures the degrees of (good) governance. One of key insights is that the public policy challenges governments are facing cannot be handled by any one organization, but require cooperation and collaboration and partnering. In a recent book on collaboration, John Wanna (2008) wrote” “Collaboration means joint working or working in conjunction with others. It implies actors—individuals, groups or organizations—cooperating in some endavour. The participants are “co-laboring” with others on terms and conditions that, as we know, can vary enormously (2008: 3). This includes contracting arrangements with for-profit and nonprofit organizations (see, for example, Amirkhanyan, Anna 2010: Romzek and Johnston 2005). Recently, Stephen Osborne (Osborne 2010) published an edited book with the title The New Public Governance? The question mark was important as other researchers were arguing that it was mainly public governance and not “new” public governance. The NPG pointed an overarching theory of institutionalized relationships within society, and Lynn et al. (2003) saw governance as the main concept for relations between governments and non-profit and for-profit sectors. A key characteristic of the NPG is focuses attention on partnerships, networks, joined-up services and new ways to work together. The numerous ways that citizens can become active and enter into co- producing relationships are noted by many observers (for a recent treatment, see Newman and Clarke 2009).

Public-Private Partnerships We could also think of the governance agenda in terms of public-private partnerships where the public sector and the private sector share risks, resources in order to produce value over time for the benefit of both sectors (Hodge and Greve 2007; Hodge et al. 2010; Skelcher 2005). Partnering for public action has been around for a long time, and many historical examples of partnering can be quoted. But the specific notion of public-private partnerships has flourished during recent years. PPPs are both associated with long term infrastructure contracts that source private finance for its operations (PFI schemes in the UK. But PPPs can also be thought of in a broader way by linking up government organizations with corporations or non-profit

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organizations. There is some overlap to the literature on networks and collaborations. PPPs in their recent incarnation have been focused on some distinctive features. One is risk analysis. PPPs are said to be able to share risks between the public sector and the private sector. Risk sharing should determine which of the many types of risk there is should be handled by the public sector or the private sector. A special organizational unit—the PPP itself—will often be established to carry out the policy or manage the task. Incorporating private finance does only involve finance itself, but also the knowledge and resources, and commitment from the private sector to PPPs. Another aspect is innovation as PPPs are said to be particularly good in breeding innovation since the partners come from different backgrounds and each can bring their own resources and ideas to the table. Better outcomes in the end should are anticipated to be the result of partnerships, see for example the title of the OECD (2008) publication: PPP: risk sharing and innovation in search for value for money. Some of the challenges connected with PPPs concern the complexity of the contracts, the tension between competition (as required by the European Union and co-operation, and the question of audit and accountability of the PPPs. PPPs can be found at many levels of government and is also attracting attention in the developing world. The European Union is shifting its attention more to PPPs now in an effort to engage the governments more in the economy.

Engaging Citizens Through Public-Making Engaging citizens in deliberation about public services and drawing on their resources and views has long been an established feature of a vibrant public sector. There are now signs that the efforts to engage citizens have been stepped up (Farazmand 2012). Citizens are still citizens who want to engage in public affairs. They did not turn into customers as empirical research in the UK has shown (Clarke et al. 2007). The concept of the customer in public services was always very problematic (Fountain 2001). Recent research and events have focused on two new issues in particular. First, there is new activism connected to the social media and the internet more widely as citizens can exert “one click” influence on many issues. Citizens can engage themselves in e-petitions, participate in crowd sourcing, write blogs, Facebook-entries and use other social media. There is a whole range of influence possibilities for citizens that are just on the verge of being explored. Many new organizing through web-activism came forward with reactions to cuts by the new coalition government in the UK as shown by Newman. Public managers are also experimenting on how to connect up with citizens as mentioned in the section on digitization. Dialogue on performance management information will also be a key feature of social and political activism. A lot of the data on performance are not exclusive anymore but can be widely accessed. The other issue is the divergence of different publics, and the complex and innovative ways that public managers engage with citizens in creating new groups of citizens. Newman and Clarke (2009) call this new phenomenon for “public-making”. Through their actions, public managers are actively in making a variety of “publics”. The category of “citizens” will therefore also be challenged as there are many different groups of citizens that may need special services or special needs. “Public-making” in Newman and Clarke’s view is not straightforward and may not only be through deliberate acts, but often through dialogue and other engaging activities, but there are clear indications that citizen involving is crucial (see Farazmand 2012).

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Overlap and Disagreement in Ideas in Public Management

In this section, the purpose is to discuss if the new ideas can be distanced from the NPM idea that has dominated so much of public management thinking in the previous decades. The identified trends could be summarized as follows:

& From IT supporting efficiency to IT as part of a digital profile, including web 2.0. social media

& From an efficiency perspective on e-government to the broader perspective of an era of digital governance which gives new possibilities for sharing and disseminating information.

& From managerialism and narrow results to a focus on public value management that include a focus on long-term outcomes

& From accountability for results (outputs) to a broader understanding of transparency and accountability in networks and a focus on longer-term results (outcomes).

& From market-based governance to concerns with broader societal challenges that no-one organization can solve by itself in the new public governance

& From citizens as consumers to citizens as co-producers, co-innovators and co- creators

The new agenda can be summarized the following way, using the Moore framework to organize the comparisons: (1) Legitimacy is created through transparency and digital access to information. Legitimacy does not only come from politicians giving mandates to change, but also the reason and values behind the arguments. The digital era makes encounters increasingly digital and makes connections easier and provides a possibility for transparency. There are consequently many sites and opportunities for accountability that extends the traditional ones. Legitimacy also derives from active citizens (see below). (2) There exist many complex public policy problems/challenges to deal with, including the meta-narrative of sustainability in this complex world, public managers strive to produce and create public value, (3) they frequently organize themselves in public policy and management networks to share experiences, risks and results. Citizens are seen as allies and partners and co-innovators more than customers to be serviced or citizens to be served. Governments at all times need the consent of the governed, as Dunleavy (2011) reminds us.

The broad categories explored above are not necessarily mutually exclusive. There may indeed be overlap. Mechanisms are likely to include re-assembling or various kinds of institutional change mechanisms as suggested by Streeck and Thelen (2005), Newman and Clarke (2009) and many others. We might explore some of the new relations as seen in Table 1.

DEG and PVM: Public value can be created using digital era solutions. The issue of transparency is one example that can help create public value and this has been one the primary objectives of the Obama administration in the USA. Transparency can help the public sector managers and employees to see what it is they are producing and give visibility to the outcomes (but also the processes). A good recent example is the innovative use of digital communication in the U.S. Recovery Act (DeSeve 2011). Value creation in a more narrow and efficiency oriented way can be when shared service centers collect and process huge amount

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of data in order for tax returns, for example, to be more precise and with fewer errors, and less prone to local judgments. The disagreement with the public value idea is if the digital agenda stays digital only, i.e. if it is not taken up, implemented and managed by governments and public managers. If public managers do not learn how use digital possibilities to reach out to the public when they create results. Another pitfall if is the digital solutions become too centralized so individual public managers lose sight of why they have to feed data into a larger digital system and thereby lose motivation for create public value.

Table 1 Public management ideas compared

Public value management Digital-era goverance Collaborative governance

Authors Moore (1995, 2000); Alford and O’Flynn (2007); Bennington and Moore (2011)

Dunleavy et al. (2006a, b); Fountain (2001); Mergel (2012); Mayer- Schönberger and Cuckier (2012)

Agranoff (2008; 2012); Donahue and Zeckhauser (2011); Farazmand (2012); O’Leary & Bingham (2008); Osborne, S. (2009)

Argument Public managers create value and focus on performance through performance management programs and dashboards

Digital era provides impetus for collecting, storing, sharing and utilizing big data and reintegrate public service delivery systems

Cross-border policy challenges inspire public organizations to collaborate with private sector organizations and other entities to find policy solutions

Different from NPM because…

It shuns private value creation in markets and encourages public value creation that use performance orientation from managers in public organizations

Market actors are too dispersed and opportunity for integrated digital solutions require government to take active role again

Market-based governance only favors private actors while collaborative efforts enlist public organizations, companies and non-profit organizations in the pursuit of shared solutions

Overlap Performance and value creation needs digital support and increasingly relies on collaborative performance networks

Digital solutions can make new opportunities for data utilization and public value creation, and digital solutions feed on input from network actors

Collaborative governance processes need to focus on objectives (public value creation) to work, and can use digital structures to support collaborative actions

Disagreement Public value creation perspectives can drown in too systematic big data efforts that centralize solutions and loses the sight of real citizen concern

Digitalization can block the opportunities for other type of collaborative governance activities, and digitalization for its own sake can distort the public value creation idea

Risk of collaborative governance leading to only processes, and no real focus on end results and value creation; and opposition to potential centralization in new digital era

Prospect for the future

Public value creation dampened by financial crisis and renewed productivity focus?

Digital era boosted by big data development

Collaborative, experimental efforts encouraged by central government agencies

Ideas in Public Management Reform for the 2010s 61

DEG and NPG: The use of social networks and the new ways that individuals and actors communicate can support the already existing policy or governance networks that exist. Partnerships may also benefit from more transparency if data on PPPs are made widely available. The U.S. government under Obama was using digital forums to support their collaboration efforts through the partnership4solution- initiative. There is a growing research area showing how digital technology can propel social and political innovation into the future (West 2011). On the more skeptical side: Dispersed networks are potentially under pressure by the re- centralization efforts that shared service centers are expressions of. Big data solutions centralize information again, and are increasingly seen as a threat to more dispersed knowledge utilization. NPG and PVM: It is clear that networks and value creation can support each other, and that there is something of a division of work between the two ideas. In its simplest sense, networks focus on process and activities, while value creation focuses on the results, often reported as outcomes for the longer term. However, this would probably be too simple as research in networks are also concerned with how outcomes are effected (Klijn for example), and public value creation is concerned with strategic-oriented and engaging public managers. But there is definitely a movement saying that the combination of a network approach to public management and a focus on intermediate or long term results are essential in public management today. Disagreement comes into the picture if public value creation can be done in big public organizations where other organizations in the private sector are less needed to bring about quality solutions. However, research shows that it is becoming increasingly difficult to put organizational borders around complex policy challenges (Kettl 2009) so value creation and networks are likely to become intertwined in the future too.

These examples show that there is overlap among these new ideas and agendas, but also some disagreements. One idea or agenda is not poised to be the only prominent one like NPM was in its heyday as a concept in the 1990s. The ideas and agendas can inspire each other. There is a case to be made for the DEG to be in driver’s seat, but combined with the two other agendas. As we have seen, PVM builds on the progress of the broader performance management movement. NPG builds on the notion of networks that have been around as a concept in the social science for decades, but only researched to greater length recently as collaboration in its many forms and shapes.

It could also be the case that these ideas are being picked up by the central government and reframed as a Neo-Weberian State (Pollitt and Bouckaert 2011; see also Durant 2000 on the neo-administrative state) so they are not so much an alternative to the government, but more an extension of the state to new actors, new connections and new goals? Recently, an analysis of cross-government collaboration suggested that collaborative governance supplements the administrative state rather than replace it (Christensen et al. (2012). The ideas can be used for the government to be run more efficiently.

Conclusions

The paper has explored the recent ideas in public management research that have challenged the dominant NPM doctrine. The recent ideas are: Digital-Era Governance,

62 C. Greve

Public Value Management, and collaborative governance and New Public Governance. All of them are self-styled alternatives or supplementary ideas to the NPM. The concepts emphasize three broad themes of digitalization and transparency, value creation in the public sector, and involvement. A shift towards the new agenda is not likely to be smooth, but depend on the way NPM has become institutionalized, and well as how the new ideas fit in existing policy programs.

Moore’s (1995, 2000) can be used as an organizing framework for the thoughts in this paper. He sees the strategic triangle in public management as involving legitimacy, value creation and organizing. It is used here as a heuristic to consider the place of ideas in public management: The DEG and digitalization is about legitimacy through transparency, PVM is about value creation, performance and results by innovative public managers, and NPG and involvement is about organizing resources through networks, collaboration, partnerships and engaged citizens.

The ideas overlap to a certain extent as modern public organizations face challenges to create results by collaboration through digital networks. In some ways, the public management ideas discussed here reflect the mega-trends observed in the larger society of the performance and results, collaboration across borders and the digital age. There is also disagreement, most notably between value creation and collaboration in relation to the controversies surround the forces of digital-era governance as it moves towards big data and centralization. NPM has been supplemented by a new and more dynamic agenda.

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Carsten Greve is professor of public management and governance at the Department of Business and Politics, Copenhagen Business School. He is also co‐director of the CBS Public Private Platform. His research is on public management reform and public‐private partnerships.

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