Mark Moore Defines Public Value

Mark Moore defines public value as the equivalent of shareholder value in public management, with the public sector acting in the best interests of the ‘collective’. The fairness with which public benefits are distributed and public duties imposed, is as important as the achievement of social outcomes or the satisfaction of individual clients.

His approach is designed to get public managers thinking about what is most valuable in the service they manage and consider how effective management can make the service the best that it can be. It presents a way of improving the quality of decision–making, by calling for public managers to engage with services users and the wider public, thereby promoting greater trust in public institutions. In the process, it meets the challenge of rising expectations of service delivery from citizens, taxpayers and clients head–on.

Lean in the public sector has generally adopted the traditional customer-value paradigm, which some argue is inappropriate as competitive market concepts cannot be simply transposed into the public service arena. The key point that Moore makes is that while in the private sector the ‘arbiter of value’ is the consumer, this does not apply in public services, where the collective (of citizens) perform this role.