UK Cabinet Office | July 2025

The Public Design Evidence Review (PDER) explores the role and value of design in the public sector. An overview of the report package can be found below.

“This document is the second of three literature reviews commissioned by the cross-government Policy Design Community and written by an interdisciplinary team of academics. It discusses the concept of public value, its origins, measurement, and application in public administration, emphasising the need for professionalisation to enhance public value delivery. The wider project was commissioned as a non-exhaustive exploration of the relationship between public design and public value. It was conducted within rapid timeframes and prioritised cross-disciplinary working.

At its core, public value can be defined both as an outcome and as a process. As an outcome, it can be defined as the achievement of broad and widely accepted societal goals – also, but not exclusively, through the delivery of public goods and services. As a process, it can be defined as the creation of an effective alignment between the ‘mission’ of a given public sector organisation (i.e. its priorities); its ‘authorising environment’ (i.e. its sources of legitimacy); and its ‘operational capacity’ (i.e. its available resources, skills, and capabilities). In this respect, it is important to differentiate between public value and public values. A public policy might create value for the public (e.g. better infrastructure or service) or aim to influence how the public values certain activities (e.g. ban on indoor smoking). Here we are interested in the former.

According to the above, public value can be measured by means of complementary tools: on the one hand, those focused on outcome (e.g. Cost-Benefit Analysis; Cost-Effectiveness Analysis; Risk-Opportunity Analysis); on the other, those focused on process (e.g. Public Value Mapping, Accounting, and Scoreboard; or HM Treasury’s Public Value Framework). Current research does not provide a definitive answer for the question of how to measure public value creation in the public sector. While Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) firmly sits at the core of contemporary government practice, its ability to yield effective policy analysis is increasingly put under question. As a result, the pressure that is engendered by contemporary societal challenges is feeding into new efforts to conceptualise and operationalise the notion of public value in new ways.

Origins of Public Value theory (Cabinet Office, 2025, p.7)

"During the last 25 years, the notion of public value (PV) has become extremely popular among researchers and practitioners alike. Still, its meaning is heavily contested. At its simplest, value is the “relative worth, utility, or importance” of something (Merriam-Webster Dictionary, 2023). In the context of the public sector, such a notion is usually identified with a range of principles that characterise what is
deemed ‘good’ public administration, such as efficiency; accountability; equity; and many more (see, e.g. Jørgensen and Bozeman, 2007). Yet, the scholarly debate around the nature and usefulness of such a concept for public management,administration, and governance is alive and kicking. This section aims to make sense of such debate by synthesising its main theoretical developments.

PV theory was born in the mid-90s at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, where Professor Mark Moore first developed it as a strategic approach to public management (Moore, 1995). His purpose was to help public managers “achieve publicly desired social outcomes” by becoming “more focused on achieving valued results; better able to measure those results; more experimental and innovative in seeking improved performance; more responsive to changing conditions; more capable of mobilizing capacities outside of government” (Moore, 2019, p. 355). His
contribution can be interpreted from at least three perspectives: first, as a philosophy of public management; second, as a tool for decision-making; third, as a set of interventions."

Such efforts come from the realisation that there is a widening gap between increasing societal challenges and governments’ ability to address citizens’ needs. In this sense, the widespread scholarly criticism towards old paradigms of public administration (New Public Management) and the rise of new ones (e.g. Neo-Weberian State, New Public Governance, Digital Era Governance) calls for a review of how the skills and routines of civil servants are evolving in order to deliver public value creation in today’s operating context. There are many features common to emerging practices in the public sector – such as a focus on external or ecosystem value creation; citizen and stakeholder engagement; and quicker feedback and learning cycles. Partially enabled or driven by profound technological changes, public organisations have responded by creating new units (e.g. policy labs) and new professions (e.g. Digital, Data and Technology Profession). Underlying both new units and professions are new skill sets that originate from both digital and public design practices. However, it is by no means clear whether such units and practices are as effective as initially thought (e.g. many policy labs remain at the edges of policy creation and delivery).

Altogether, such shifts in the way the public sector operates can be distilled into a new ethos of civil service founded on four characteristics:

• Wisdom: i.e. the capability to anticipate future changes in the policy context and reform public institutions to cater for long-term phenomena.
• Imagination: i.e. the capability to design, inspire, and motivate change in the operational routines of a public sector organisation while ensuring stability in delivery.
• Collaboration: i.e. the capability to design and develop policy in partnership with multiple stakeholders within and beyond the public sector.
• Humility: i.e. the capability to revise existing assumptions about effective policy design and delivery – primarily, through experimentation.

While civil servants’ practice provides an early indication that a new paradigm is assuming form, it is still unclear how these characteristics can be embedded into the everyday practice of civil service: i.e. how to professionalise public value delivery. Based on a review of the potential and limitations of strategies based on policy innovation labs (PILs) and three additional pathways to professionalisation (i.e. leadership, competency frameworks, and communities of practice), we propose an approach labelled ‘practice-based leadership’. This approach provides an initial hypothesis for how public management can engage its civil servants into the development of new working routines – such as public design – and their consolidation into new policy professions capable of maximising public value delivery at scale.”

Bibliography

Cabinet Office (2025). Public Design Evidence Review: Literature Review Paper 2 – Public Value.

Download report. The report contains an interesting extended list of publications on public value.