Building on existing academic and policy work around public value, The Work Foundation’s project aims to help policymakers, public managers and institutions understand the concept of public value and see how it can be applied in practice.

Public value addresses many of the contemporary concerns facing public managers. These include problems of securing legitimacy for decision making, resource allocation and measuring service outcomes. This research project draws together different strands of the current debate around public value, clarifies its elements and seeks to further understanding of this topical and important conceptual innovation in public service delivery. 

The project’s objectives are to: 

• provide a clear definition of public value provide public managers with a set of guiding principles that orient institutions to the creation of public value use sector and case studies to illustrate how organisations might understand where gaps occur in achieving public value clarify the components and processes of public value in order to facilitate its future capture and measurement.