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The Public Value Debate: Emerging Ethical Issues

How we conceive of and understand ethics and ethical issues is affected by waves of reform and new understandings of what happens in the public sector. Despite the change that comes with reform, enduring tensions and questions remain. An important one which has both fascinated and frustrated scholars and practitioners has been the separation of politics and administration, and the proper roles of key actors in this equation. As a third generation of reform takes hold a debate has emerged as to the merits (or not) of one approach – public value. In part the debate takes us back to these enduring tensions and questions raising important ethical issues in the process.This paper is preliminary bringing together recent work on public value and emerging work I am pursuing on the role of public managers. It is a sketch at best but it does provide the bare bones of this next phase of work. I present it here to prompt some discussion on the ethical issues that grow from it. In the first section I first provide a brief introduction to public management as a field; second, I sketch the current debate around public value; third, I connect this to the enduring struggle about the separation of politics and administration and the proper role of these actors. Finally, I open up the space for posing relevant questions as they relate to ethics.