Understanding and Creating Public Value: Business is the engine, government the flywheel (and also the regulator)

In this essay, we define the meaning and content of public value, show how government and business create public value, and briefly explain why their governance arrangements work the way they do. We deal first with business and then government. We conclude that government manages risks and that governmental value creation is distinctively concerned with stability. Hence, to make government work better, risk management ought to be central to the practice of public finance, public policy, and public administration. Understanding the importance of stability is potentially of even greater importance to those who research and teach public policy and administration. Indeed, we propose that the elaboration of a general risk assessment model explaining, among other things, government's systemic inclination to stability, would take our field a long towards integration with mainstream positive social science and, therefore, holds out the prospect of considerable interdisciplinary consilience, although at this time we can do no more than suggest the contours of such a model.