Australian Politics and Policy - Senior, 2019a

Australian Politics and Policy
For instance, Stoker suggests a public value style is well suited to fragmented
governance systems in the sense that ‘it bases its practice in the systems of dialogue
and exchange that characterize networked governance’. 79 The public value framework
requires public sector managers to:
• aim to create something that is substantively valuable – that is, to constitute
public value
• be legitimate and politically sustainable, in the sense that they attract enough
ongoing support and resources from the authorising environment
• be operationally and administratively feasible, drawing on available organisational
and external capabilities. 80
In contrast to the private sector, which can focus solely on monetary outcomes
and creating value for private shareholders, public value emphasises a much
broader range of activities valued by the public. The concept requires public
managers to search for and identify economic, social and environmental goals
valued by citizens, such as climate change adaptation. This necessitates constant
engagement with communities and stakeholders, as well as greater recognition
of the legitimacy of a wider range of stakeholders in realising these goals. For
instance, procurement processes that adopt a public value orientation require an
open-minded approach to identifying the best supplier for a service, regardless of
whether they are public, private and/or non-government providers. This means
that local governments must remain constantly attuned to public preferences and
integrate these into their service-delivery activities. 81
Public value requires commitment to new goals and ways of working that are
more demanding than those that existed when local governments were established
in the colonial era. As the role of Australian local governments has expanded to
include services to people, they have begun moving down the public value pathway,
using place-based planning and working with communities and stakeholders to
identify broader goals and ways of achieving them. However, a more ambitious
reform agenda is required to build the regulatory, financial, human and technical
capabilities that contemporary local governments need to deliver on this commitment.
This is the major challenge facing modern Australian local government.
References
Alford, John, and Janine O’Flynn (2009). Making sense of public value: concepts, critiques and
emergent meanings. International Journal of Public Administration 32: 171–91. DOI: 10.1080/
01900690902732731
79 Stoker 2006, 41.
80 Sources: Alford and O’Flynn 2009; Grant and Fisher 2011; Stoker 2006, 46–9; Williams and
Shearer 2011.
81 Benington 2009.
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