OECD - Public Value in Public Service Transformation

The rise of platform economies, new consumption patterns and innovative technologies are transforming both service delivery and peoples lives in general. Smart solutions are entering our everyday lives and digitalisation and datafication of everything is the norm. In political economy, short-term considerations seem to prevail, while long-term challenges with cascading effects (like climate change and demographic shifts) are already being felt. Governments around the world are facing an unprecedented transformation process, where systems that have worked and delivered results in prior decades are being questioned.

This requires governments to engage in systems change in new ways. Indeed, governments need to think about the future in a way that simultaneously leaves options open and focuses on long-term reform priorities. This means moving from a tactical to a strategic approach to system change. Strategic systems thinking means engaging with the future in new ways, considering the input of citizens and understanding the impact of changing public values. With fundamental shifts in societys expected behaviour, the notion of public value is evolving to encompass variables that are hard to codify (e.g. trust, inclusiveness transparency, legitimacy, effectiveness, privacy, accountability). Thus, a more nuanced way to articulate shifts in systems is to look at how the composition of public value transforms during systems change.

The report argues that the way in which public governance will change in the future, will depend on how public sector manages three interdependent aspects:

• envisioning and acting on a specific future (making the future actionable);

• leading the systemic change process with a public value-based approach (both in directing change, but also analysing the effects of innovative change from a value perspective); and

• how democratic the overall process is i.e. how are citizens engaged in the decision making (collective understanding of what kind of future citizens aspire to and what values they hold dear).

Chapter 1 discusses how to think about the future in a changing urban context and how the recent smart governance trend fits the narrative. Chapter 2 analyses the public value domain, outlining the need to frame problems differently and tackles how to use the language of value to do so. Chapter 3 addresses how to engage citizens in this new era. Different key components of the process are outlined, such as risk and uncertainty, participation, deliberation and sortation. By connecting these three topics, the report put forward a new framework for using systems approaches to foster systems change.