Public Organiz Rev

DOI 10.1007/s11115-013-0253-8

Ideas in Public Management Reform for the 2010s.

Digitalization, Value Creation and Involvement

Carsten Greve

# 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

C. Greve (*)
Department of Business and Politics, Copenhagen Business School, Steen Blichers Vej 22,
2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark
e-mail: cg.dbp@cbs.dk
 C. Greve

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
Ideas in Public Management Reform for the 2010s

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).
 C. Greve

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
Ideas in Public Management Reform for the 2010s

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
 C. Greve

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”
Ideas in Public Management Reform for the 2010s

(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-
 C. Greve

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”,
Ideas in Public Management Reform for the 2010s

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
 C. Greve

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
Ideas in Public Management Reform for the 2010s

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).
 C. Greve

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
Ideas in Public Management Reform for the 2010s

Table 1 Public management ideas compared

Public value management Digital-era goverance Collaborative governance

Authors Moore (1995, 2000); Alford Dunleavy et al. (2006a, b); Agranoff (2008; 2012);
and O’Flynn (2007); Fountain (2001); Mergel Donahue and Zeckhauser
Bennington and Moore (2012); Mayer- (2011); Farazmand (2012);
(2011) Schönberger and Cuckier O’Leary & Bingham
(2012) (2008); Osborne, S. (2009)
Argument Public managers create value Digital era provides impetus Cross-border policy
and focus on performance for collecting, storing, challenges inspire public
through performance sharing and utilizing big organizations to
management programs and data and reintegrate public collaborate with private
dashboards service delivery systems sector organizations and
other entities to find policy
solutions
Different It shuns private value creation Market actors are too Market-based governance
from NPM in markets and encourages dispersed and opportunity only favors private actors
because… public value creation that for integrated digital while collaborative efforts
use performance solutions require enlist public organizations,
orientation from managers government to take active companies and non-profit
in public organizations role again organizations in the pursuit
of shared solutions
Overlap Performance and value Digital solutions can make Collaborative governance
creation needs digital new opportunities for data processes need to focus on
support and increasingly utilization and public value objectives (public value
relies on collaborative creation, and digital creation) to work, and can
performance networks solutions feed on input use digital structures to
from network actors support collaborative
actions
Disagreement Public value creation Digitalization can block the Risk of collaborative
perspectives can drown in opportunities for other type governance leading to only
too systematic big data of collaborative processes, and no real
efforts that centralize governance activities, and focus on end results and
solutions and loses the digitalization for its own value creation; and
sight of real citizen sake can distort the public opposition to potential
concern value creation idea centralization in new
digital era
Prospect for Public value creation Digital era boosted by big Collaborative, experimental
the future dampened by financial data development efforts encouraged by
crisis and renewed central government
productivity focus? agencies

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.
 C. Greve

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,
Ideas in Public Management Reform for the 2010s

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.