Acceso usuarios
City of Cambridge, Estados Unidos
The purpose of this brief paper is to present core idea is a simple one: public managers should be focused on “creating public value” from the assets entrusted to them by the public. Those assets include public money, raised through the power of taxation, to provide for the public welfare. But they also often include the authority of the state to regulate the conduct of private actors either to prevent them from doing harm to the public welfare, or to require them to make contributions to the overall public good. It may also include their ability to kindle or take advantage of some pre-existing “public spirit”: -- the desires of citizens to contribute to important public purposes, or at least to do their duty or contribute their fair share to common efforts. To create public value, we need public managers with “restless, value-seeking imaginations” looking for opportunities to do so, figuring out how those opportunities might be exploited, and then doing so. This is an entrepreneurial style of management that is possible in the public sector only if one fully understands and acts in accord with the important processes of democratic legitimation and public accountability.To guide those particular, concrete efforts to improve individual and social life, I embedded the concept of public value in a second, closely related concept called the strategic triangle. The strategic triangle was constructed to provide the basis for challenging students to take an active, agentic stance and commit themselves to “creating public value” in their professional roles. I did this in part because I did not want the concept of public value to get lost entirely in the philosophical abstractions of what was value, who was the public, and what did they want.
