Governing the City State - Chief Minister and Treasury Directorate ...

Australia, should be capable of significant institutional agility. However, the power oftraditional hierarchical public service governance arrangements and structures which stifleinnovation, encourage insular siloed thinking, and make whole of government collaborationhard is evident in the ACTPS. It is evident from staff consultations that there is a genuineand powerful desire to be innovative and improve how the ACTPS works. At the same time,however, it is equally evident that the dominance of risk adverse entrenched cultures andnorms of behaviour make working this way very difficult, if not impossible.Citizen-Centred Governance and Public ValueThe increasing desire from within and outside public services to engage citizens in policydesign and decision-making and in program design and delivery, has been the focus ofsignificant academic and practitioner thought in recent years. Within the broader organisingframe of agility outlined above, genuinely participatory decision making offers significantscope to improve the quality of support to the Government’s strategic policy setting as wellas to the quality of service delivery to the citizenry.The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) notes governmentshave been slow to embrace the advantages of participatory decision making, but argues:informing, consulting and engaging citizens are core elements of good governance, means forpromoting openness, and a sound investment in better policy making. They allow governmentto tap new sources of policy-relevant ideas, information and resources when makingdecisions. Equally important, they contribute to building public trust in government, raisingthe quality of democracy and strengthening civic capacity. 56Increasingly, discussion about deepening community engagement in governance frameworksand decision-making is being viewed through the prism of Public Value Management, and inthis context, the ANZSOG Institute for Governance at the University of Canberra argues NewPublic Management, so influential in public services through the 1980’s and 1990’s, is:now simply unequal to the challenge of public service provision in an era of governance. Thisis because it privileges the role of technocrats, takes the politics out of public policydeliberation and its market orientation is at odds with the concept of public service sittingmore easily with the language of the consumer rather the language of the citizen. Inconsequence, the success of public service reform rests on the development of citizen-centredgovernance structures which can meet the demands of both representative democracy and theefficient delivery of public goods. 57The notion of public value was coined at the Harvard Kennedy School by Mark Moore in1995 58 and the emergence of a Public Value Management paradigm reflects a shift in focusfrom Government to governance brought about by increasing reliance on non-government56 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (2003) Open Government: Fostering Dialogue with Civil Society,Paris, p.11.57 ANZSOG Institute for Governance (2009) Reform of Australian Government Administration: Building the world’s best publicservice – A Submission by the ANZSOG Institute for Governance at the University of Canberra. Canberra, p.5.58 Moore, M (1995) Creating Public Value – Strategic Management in Government. Harvard University Press, CambridgeMass.Governing the City State: 61