In the mid-1990s, Michael Moore identified the need for creating value in the public sector to ensure a balance between the traditional model of public administration and the emphasis on applying private sector management concepts and techniques in the public sector. The fundamental idea is that such public value may enhance the legitimacy of public organisations, which in turn will help in effective public service delivery. In spite of experimentations over the next two decades, public service delivery remains a major challenge in modern developmental states. Strategies developed to deal with problems such as poverty, corruption, environmental degradation, child labour, and efforts at community engagement and co-creation of value have achieved modest success. Service delivery in modern developmental states is affected by the lack of capacity of public agencies. In recent years, the call for engaging the private and not-for-profit sectors has added a new dimension in the mode of service delivery and public value creation.
It is important to review the strategy of marshalling all societal forces – public and private - to bring together different ideas and capacities that has the potential of creating or adding value in public service delivery. The rise in popularity of collaborative governance, public private partnerships and other strategies in modern developmental states in Africa, other parts of Asia and Latin America illustrate this point. Despite attempts to create value in public service delivery, the engagement of other sectors in this critical area has remained under researched.
It is important to identify and examine innovative approaches to meet service delivery objectives. While the public value framework provides yet another approach for managing and delivering public services, these ideas can be strengthened and contextualized from the tenets of development administration theory. Learning lessons from development administration is important because knowledge about public value creation continues to be informed by information on the public sector management from the developed world. The paper argues that knowledge and insight obtained from research on development administration can be effectively integrated with the existing strategies for public value creation.
The paper intends to address the following questions: What theoretical perspective can be used to examine and explain the phenomenon of public value creation and management in developing countries and developmental states? What lessons can be learned from development administration theory by developmental states in creating public value and meeting the challenges of public service? How can development administration inform the construction, establishment, and institutionalisation of democratic institutions to create value in public service delivery in developmental states? What lessons can developmental states/countries learn as they attempt to emulate strategies from the developed countries in the building of indigenous innovative practices to meet the objectives of public service delivery?
We answer these questions from the review of the extant literature on public administration and public value management.
