Public Value is a theory for public management advanced by Professor Mark Moore of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. In 1995, Professor Mark Moore’s seminal book on ‘Public Value’ (Moore, 1995) was published. Over the previous two decades, staff and students at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where Moore taught, engaged in conversations about how to produce excellence in public management. Moore’s resultant book describes a ‘Public Value’ theory and framework to guide and underpin a new paradigm of public management called Networked Governance. It provides a new paradigm for public management; empowering public managers to greater engagement with, and focus on, citizens and consumers in an ongoing deliberative process to negotiate and shape public preferences for what is valuable and what they should produce. Public Value theory is increasingly being adopted in the west but has not been universally accepted and the development of measurement criteria is ongoing. There is continuing academic debate about the need for its adaptation outside of the western world.
Since the publication of Moore’s book, there has been a proliferation of writing on the subject of ‘Public Value’ by politicians, public servants, public sector managers, academics and consultants.

Many public sector organizations have adopted Public Value theory wholesale, or individual elements of it.

STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM

Public value refers to the value created by the government through laws, regulations, services and any other action. In a democratic society, this value is defined by the public themselves. Value is determined by citizens preferences expressed in a variety of ways and thus it provides a rough yard stick against which to gauge the public institutions and government policies.

For something to be of public value, it’s not an enough criteria for it to be desirable by public. The only way of measuring it is to know if the citizens are willing to give something up in