The generation of public value by public organizations for citizens, in diverse social and economical topics, has been an object of analysis and strong debates in social sciences and administration and management sciences. New paradigms arisen recently, looking to satisfy economical and social agents' needs, but they hardly combat the lack of efficiency and mainly efficacy perception people have on public initiatives. The concept of public value can be defined as something that improves the life conditions for a community and whose benefits are appreciated by that community. Defining what is valuable for society, and considering this definition to establish the goals and the extent of a public initiative, is one of the toughest challenges in public administration. The results for a specific public initiative must the needs and expectations of society and, at the same time, observe the laws and regulations, and follow the experts' advice. The outcomes and expected value are conditioned by the capability to access information and by the way this information is transmitted to stakeholders. In this article, we propose a questionnaire to identify and map key stakeholders for a specific public initiative, in order to identify and understand the potential interested individuals and groups. This helps public officers to identify the best way to share information with those interested, and to evaluate the generation of public value. By using this questionnaire we were able to identify the key stakeholders for an exports encouragement program in a medium-size city in Brazil, whose vision must be considered to create public value for this public program.
TopIntroduction
The formulation, design, implementation, evaluation, and control of public initiatives represent one of the main challenges in public administration. Socioeconomic issues and the grow and force of new social actors can limit public managers’ actions (Naím, 2013). Traditional public administration based on Weber’s classic theories has difficulties to respond to contemporary efficiency, efficacy, and effectiveness requirements. (Brulon, Ohayon, & Rosenberg, 2012). To solve this, public sector is been looking for ways to go from a bureaucratic administration to an efficiency-based administration in the last decades. This last view is being challenged by the idea that public administration’s goal is to create value for society (Moore, 1995).
There’s been created lots of theories and models for public administration. It is clear that all of them look to establish new standards and practices in order to properly balance individual’s needs and wishes with the collective dimension present in every public domain (city, region, and nation). We can emphasize on two main approaches: one of them focuses in the ideal of a small state and efficiency as the ultimate goal; the other, focuses in the ideal of public value creation.
The first approach, called New Public Management (NPM), developed in the 1980’s decade (Brulon et al., 2012), created a big pressure for costs cutting in public sector – as an answer to the oil and political crisis in the 1970’s decade – based on the premise that, in practice, public sector responds to individual rather than collective interests (O’Flynn, 2007a). Because of this, for New Public Management supporters, public administration is inefficient by nature, making reforms like reduction of state agencies size, privatization of public services, competition between public officers and agencies, and market oriented public management, necessary (Stewart & Walsh, 1992). NPM was widely adopted in the United Kingdom and the in the United States in the 1980’s decade, under Margaret Thatcher’s and Ronald Reagan’s administrations, respectively.
The second approach, called Public Value Management (PVM), developed between the 1990’s and the 2010’s decades, focuses in the citizen, rather than in the market (Stoker, 2006). In Public Value Management, the goal of public administration is the creation of public value for citizens (M. H. Moore, 1995).
Literature reviews show consensus on the public administration core objectives Even with differences in the means proposed, most authors agree that the main purpose of public administration is to create public value (Bozeman, 2007; Denhardt & Denhardt, 2000; M. M. Moore, 1994; O’Flynn, 2007b; Stoker, 2006). Public value can be understood by making an analogy with private sector, in which managers’ main goal is to create private value for the company’s stakeholders. However, while in private sector is clear that value is defined and measured by things like profit, sales volume, and stock returns, in public sector each program, project or policy’s nature make value definition different according to its nature. Even worse, for the same nature, different sectors of society have different priorities, interests, desires, and expected outcomes.
In this chapter, we are going to analyze how to properly identify the stakeholders for a determined public initiative. To solve this problem, we are going to use an approach based on Information and Knowledge Management. Information constitutes a fundamental resource to support individual citizens’ and collective agents’ decisions. Information is both a structural and a structuring element for activities, in public and private organizations, and in economy in general, as it is a basic resource for proper operation of these activities. Information creation, transmission, and management are related to environmental turbulence in organizations, especially in public organizations, when considering the speed of changes in thoughts, feelings, and opinions, and the difficulties to predict these changes. This speed in public preferences changes obligate public organizations to properly acquire, manage, store, retrieve, and distribute information, as a key success factor for organizations, even if they are public or private.