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Arguments over public policy typically depend on disagreements about public values. The conflicts arise over the relative importance of various goals. Normally, such disagreements are fought out in the contexts of specific decisions, and so are fought out over and over again, at enormous social cost each time another decision must be made. This chapter proposes a method that can spell out explicitly what each individual's or group's values are, showing how and how much they differ—and in the process can frequently reduce the extent of such differences. The chapter is organized around three examples. One is land use management; the specific example is a stud aimed at the decision problems of the California Coastal Commission. The second example is concerned with administrative decision-making, specifically, with the process that the Office of Child Development of the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare used to develop its research program for the 1974 fiscal year. The third example concerns an attempt to develop a consensus among disagreeing experts on water quality about a measure of the merits of various water sources for two purposes: the input, before treatment, to a public water supply, and an environment for fish and wild life.

The laws that advance the aims of the republic, institutionalize its forms, and establish regulatory controls need to be supported by republican civil norms; the legal republic needs to become a civil reality. One reason that widespread civility is needed is that people can be assured of their non‐domination only so far as others recognize normative reasons for respecting them, not just reasons connected to fear of legal sanctions. Another is that if the republic is to be systematically sensitive to the interests and ideas of people—often newly emergent, newly articulated interests and ideas—then there have to be people who are virtuous enough to press appropriate claims; this applies both in the politics of difference and in the politics of common concerns. And a last reason why widespread civility is needed is that the public authorities cannot hope to identify and sanction all offences against republican laws and norms; ordinary people also have to be committed enough to perform in that role or to support the efforts of the authorities. Widespread civility is likely to be supported by the intangible hand of regard‐based sanctioning, since the honourable are destined in most circumstances to be the honoured, and the state must be careful not to impose forms of sanctioning, which might get in the way of that process. Civility or civic virtue may not be so difficult to achieve, as it often seems. It involves not just the internalization of public values and the disciplining of personal desires; given the communitarian nature of freedom as non‐domination, it also involves identification with larger groups, even with the polity as a whole, and access to new and satisfying identities.

The comparative historical approach of the previous chapters helps us understand what countries have done. Noting the variety of approaches implemented also spurs us to think about how much freedom we should grant to racists, and just how societies should go about making these vital decisions. Rather than providing a one-size-fits-all answer to the first issue, this chapter offers a framework that encourages individuals to formulate conclusions based on the interaction of three factors: an understanding of the context of the decision; an assessment of the likely effects of particular policy choices; and a reflection about key principles that focuses on gauging the harm of racism and calibrating a proportionate response to that harm. Turning to the second concern, the chapter emphasizes the importance of a process of public deliberation. Balancing core values is a difficult task in any country. This chapter makes the case that the most legitimate outcomes are likely to emerge from citizen engagement through the legislative process rather than from top-down decisionmaking through the courts.

This chapter discusses the conception of “publicly justifiable privacy,” which clarifies the implications of the principle of public relevance for thinking about the divide between public and private. This conception of publicly justifiable privacy challenges the traditional liberal approach of separating public values from the internal dynamics of the family and civil society. According to publicly justifiable privacy, family and civil society practices that conflict with free and equal citizenship should be protected by rights, but ideally should be amended to be compatible with public values. The chapter then argues that people should engage in reflective revision to change those personal beliefs and practices.

In the context of public sector organizations, the governance model for co-production could help to deliver better public services that fulfill the expectations of citizens, via crowdsourcing. This chapter considers how and why co-production is a valuable solution for producing public services, but also highlights the challenges that public sector organizations face when co-production is adopted without being customized for public sector service delivery. In the context of the public sector, co-production needs to be focused on public value creation and not on public service production processes. This subtle shift in focus allows us to discuss how and why adopting co-production models that are successful in the private sector cannot be applied directly to public sector organizations; instead they need to be tailored in the light of a better understanding of the requirements of public value creation.

This chapter examines the consequences of leadership, rigorously questioning the extent to which the claims of a link between leadership and performance are justified, both in terms of evidence of causation and also because of attributional processes. The discussion explores evidence of impact by using the public value chain (covering inputs, activities, partnerships, outputs, user satisfaction and outcomes) and emphasising the need to consider the contribution to the common good not just contribution to organisational or network effectiveness.

This chapter explores some of the controversies and uses of contracts put to use by modern governments. The first part examines the potential scope of ‘government by contract’. The second part discusses three aspects of the critique of government by contract: the absence of controls on when the government can use contract; the weakness of controls over the government's behaviour during the contracting process; and concerns about the place of public interest values in government contracts. All these aspects offer some guidance as to the issues which may need to be addressed in a study of internal government contracts. The chapter also provides an important background on the controversies on internal government contracts.

This chapter addresses the following questions: what contribution can criminological knowledge make to shaping responses to crime in a polity which acknowledges crime and punishment to be properly political issues? What in a democracy is the public value of criminology? What is the collective good that criminological enquiry seeks to promote? What modes of intervention — and what institutional arrangements — can best realize that good? To answer these questions a new figure, or perhaps more accurately, a revived and updated old one, is introduced. This character, following and extending John Locke (1690/1975), is called the democratic under-labourer. The figure is used to elaborate and defend the idea that we can best give coherence to criminology's public purpose by understanding its role as one of seeking to foster and sustain a better politics of crime and its regulation. This figure — the hero or heroine of the drama that follows — emerges from an effort to revisit and revise an earlier treatment of these issues by Garland and Sparks.

The Introduction positions the book in relation to contemporary and long-standing arguments about the public value of the humanities. It lays out five common claims for the humanities: the justification by way of their distinctive kind of work, and the distinctive character of the disciplines; the claim that they have value in ways that are necessarily at odds with or at a remove from instrumental use value; the claim that they have a contribution to make to individual and collective happiness; the ‘democracy needs us’ claim; and the claim that they have value ‘for their own sake’. It explains the methodology of the book, and the contribution it aims to make to arguments about the public purpose of the humanities in the form of a pluralistic account of their value.

This chapter considers an emerging second generation of resource-regulating laws which would benefit humans by recognizing a substantive human right to an unpolluted and nondepleted natural environment; and requiring that public ecological values be a check on private resource use decisions.

This chapter examines whether Montgomery County's planning politics served the public interest. It first considers the various schools of thought regarding the public interest, including utilitarianism, Public Choice Theory, pluralism, John Rawls' theory of justice, and Regime Theory. It then reduces these theories to a number of questions about how well Montgomery's planning politics satisfies different substantive and procedural notions of public interest; for example, whether the General Plan and the pattern of development fostered by it have embodied widely accepted public values; whether the overall pattern of development has been more beneficial than costly to the county as a whole; whether decisions have been made in ways that honor core principles of fairness and democratic governance; or whether the politics of planning has fostered the development of civic capital and problem solving.

The conclusion summarizes the claims as they emerge from critical examination in Chapters 1 to 5. It then explores their collective relevance to debates about the claims on the public purse of incommensurable, but not incomparable, goods. A detailed description is given of what is involved in the problem of comparing incommensurables, and of the particular conditions that affect the humanities’ claims for public funding.

This chapter asks what aspects of health matter to the public allocation of health-related resources, and it discusses Erik Nord’s and Paul Menzel’s view that those who make health policy should be guided by “the social value” of health states, which depends both on the private value of health and on considerations of fairness. In contrast to Nord and Menzel, chapter 13 distinguishes “public” from “private” or “personal” values, and argues that public values should depend upon the aims of public policy. In a liberal state those aims consist of the facilitation of individual activity and the provision of public goods, including, crucially, the lessening of suffering. Chapter 13 argues that this view of the state is superior to a liberal welfarism that sees that state as aiming to assist its citizens to satisfy their preferences.

This chapter shifts the focus from the analytical and the descriptive to the normative and the reflective. A key issue is how public values can be forced upon the ecosystem’s architecture—an architecture whose core is overwhelmingly controlled by (US) tech giants pushing economic values and corporate interests, often at the expense of a (European) focus on social values and collective interests. The mechanisms of datafication, commodification, and selection seem to afford tech companies unprecedented infrastructural, sectoral, and intersectoral powers. However, the ecosystem’s architecture is adaptable to changing societal norms and awareness about potential harms. This book’s search for underlying patterns and systemic mechanisms prompts a final reflection on the “what,” “how,” and “who” of governance: what kind of public values do we want to incorporate into the design of the platform society, how do we do that, and who is responsible for doing so?

The public value of a health state depends on its subjective character (“distress” or “suffering”) and the limitations it imposes on the range of activities that individuals are able to undertake successfully. The relevant regards in which health states differ from one another are accordingly distress and activity limitations. Although both of these dimensions are themselves multidimensional, chapter 14 how to establish a complete ranking of health states with respect to each of them and how to provide a sensible mapping from the two dimensions (distress and activity limitations) to a single scalar ordering. Given that ordering, chapter 14 then considers how to define an interval-valued measure of the public value of limitation/distress (L/D) pairs.

The work of Callon on the ‘performativity of economics’ and of Latour on the notion of ‘composition in economics’ proposes to analyse how markets are constructed and what their consequences are for (public) values. This empirical turn would allow social studies of market scholars to analyse how ‘valuemeters’ shape such values in practice. Following the construction and use of a funding scheme in Dutch hospital care, the chapter shows that this market device indeed profoundly shaped the values it was supposed to ensure. Quality for example became shaped rather exclusively in cost-saving terms. Since this happens despite the wide availability of value-meters that try to articulate quality as not merely financial, the chapter concludes that the composition of values in governance practices should be both about enacting and about disarticulating certain values. Composition should therefore not be presented as the antonym of critique; composition urgently needs to become critical composition.

This chapter introduces the book Australian Public Policy: Progressive Ideas in the Neoliberal Ascendancy. The chapter examines questions of the status of neoliberalism and social democracy in Australian politics and public policy, recent changes to the Australian policy settlement, and related issues of pragmatism, inertia and process in Australian politics and policy development. Trends and problems in major policy areas – education, economics, cultural and indigenous, social welfare, population, cities, housing and the environment – are examined highlighting the limits of mainstream approaches and the need for more creative and inclusive public and civic responses. Questions of the fragility of the Australian identity and the need for greater cohesion around core social and public values are addressed as issues at the centre of debate about a new progressive policy agenda. While the resilience of Australian society is noted, questions linger about how robust Australian institutions and conventions are in the face of new economic, social and environmental challenges.

This chapter is the first of a set of four chapters exploring the themes of the book more empirically within particular health care organizations. This chapter analyses the bureaucratic career of a succession of national-level service improvement agencies apparent in the English health care sector since around 2000. There have also been a series of reorganizations in this domain which have consistently failed to secure a high level of autonomy; their bureaucratic career as agencies has therefore been somewhat disappointing. We also examine the types of preferred management knowledge espoused by these agencies, which absorbed and then disseminated to the health care field conventional forms of private firm related and business school produced knowledge, which has been highly influential in the latest cycle. However, there is also evidence of some interesting exceptions (public value, social movements) to this pattern which we had not expected and which complicate the assessment.