There is a school of thought which argues that in order to rebalance internal and external performance standards, internal and external commitment to the work of public service, NPM models need to evolve into a new practice. Public Value Management has taken root in the crevices opened by NPM—between government and governed, between purchaser and provider, between performance indicators and public services:[71]
… the practice of the new public management often emphasised narrow concepts of cost-efficiency over other considerations (i.e. the focus was on technical rather than allocative efficiency). Those things that were easy to measure tended to become objectives and those that couldn’t were downplayed or ignored. Hence within some public services ‘efficiency’ measures represented the average cost of processing a given output (e.g. Finished Consultant Episodes in hospitals), regardless of what mattered to the public. In these circumstances it was possible for measures of efficiency to improve without there being a concomitant improvement in the service experienced by the user (as occurred under the internal market when measured outputs increased substantially but service quality did not). Improvements in efficiency in this narrow sense were not synonymous with increases in public value.[72]
Public Value Management is premised on a view of public value that is ‘a broader measure than is conventionally used within the new public management literature, covering outcomes, the means used to deliver them as well as trust and legitimacy’.[73] This means equity, ethos and accountability are effectively part of the service delivered by government.[74] Insofar as it calls for the negotiation of community service priorities ‘on the ground’, Public Value Management is continuous with calls for local autonomy in configuring whole of government service delivery. The Management Advisory Committee did not hesitate, for example, to argue that ‘from an implementation point of view it will also be critical, once the right people are in the right jobs, to give them the necessary flexibility and authority to deliver integration, particularly for whole of government service delivery’.[75] However, many theorists also see Public Value Management principles as applying at a higher level, where the authority to deliver service integration has become the authority to design policy within the limits set by a particular ‘authorising environment’.[76] These proposals raise issues for Westminster systems in general[77] and for Australian arrangements in particular, because they assume a system in which the processes of devolution and outsourcing release rather than reconfigure power.
In Australia, however, as was argued in chapter 4, the government may have devolved managerial power but it retained and even recentralised policy control:
The Australian case provides a distinct change of direction from classic NPM features towards a multi-dimensional integrated model. The comprehensive change program covers the resurrection of the central agency as a major actor; enhancement of control over departments; central monitoring of delivery at agency level; implementation of a whole-of-government approach; and departmentalisation through absorbing statutory authorities and reclaiming control over independent agencies … Underlying the redirection are political control and performance issues – the government that drove a neo-liberal variant of NPM has had to confront the impact of its own reforms …[78]
The Australian government has tightened rather than relaxed its controls over its public services—not just as a consequence of changed systems of management but also through the act of outsourcing itself used as a means of political agenda-setting. Australia may be no more than an outlier in the latter respect—other countries may be using whole-of-government issues as an opportunity for some recentralising—but the point is that despite the rhetoric around collaboration and negotiation with communities, the model continues to be surrounded by ‘political control and performance issues’.
These issues are not easily resolved or reconciled. Public Value Management has considerable implications for the APS Values as a management tool, for responsiveness as a management driver, and for the ethos of public service. In particular, it suggests a means of rebalancing responsiveness as a value, returning to it a strong flavour of community orientation that was evident in the 1976 report of the RCAGA. However, it appears to do this by introducing a concept of public interest that is not determined by the government of the day, but by public servants in consultation with communities and providers. It has been argued that Public Value Management approaches give public service managers a capacity to shape policy and ‘a degree of autonomy and entrepreneurialism that is not typical of public servants in Westminster systems’,[79] and does not sit comfortably in those systems. While this is true, its emphases on values such as equity, ethics, public trust and legitimacy do sit comfortably in a Westminster system, as does its insistence that these are also part of the public’s interest in public service decision making. That aspect of the public interest is the subject of the final chapter.
[71] For a full account of openings created by NPM for PVM, see Gerry Stoker, ‘Public Value Management: A New Narrative for Networked Governance?’, American Review of Public Administration 36(1) (Mar. 2006), 41–57; Gavin Kelly, Geoff Mulgan and Stephen Muers, ‘Creating Public Value: An Analytical Framework for Public Service Reform’, Strategy Unit, UK Cabinet Office (2002), at www.strategy.gov.uk, viewed 6 Mar. 2007; ‘Citizens, Government, Democracy: A New Deal?’, Saskatchewan Institute of Public Policy, University of Regina, no. 1 (2000), 6, at http://www.uregina.ca/sipp/documents/pdf/may.pdf, viewed 3 July 2007 (extracting material from a speech to the Institute by Jocelyn Bourgon); and sources in Martin Marcussen and Jacob Torfing, ‘Grasping Governance Networks’, Centre for Democratic Network Governance, Roskilde University Working Paper Series no 5 (2003), 4–5.
[72] Kelly et al., ‘Creating Public Value’, 9.
[73] Ibid. 3.
[74] Ibid.
[75] Management Advisory Committee, Connecting Government, 52. See also p. 101.
[76] R. A. W. Rhodes and John Wanna, ‘The Limits to Public Value, or Rescuing Responsible Governments from the Platonic Guardians’, Australian Journal of Public Administration 66(4) (2007), 409.
[77] See ibid. 406–21.
[78] Halligan, ‘The Integrated Performance Model’, 1. See also similar comments from Podger, ‘Looking Upwards and Downwards’.
[79] Rhodes and Wanna, ‘Limits to Public Value’, 409.