Contextualising public value theory and its measurement in public administration

Abstract

This article provides the contextualisation of public value theory and its measurement in Public Administration. It explores the various definitions of public value and how the public value theory has evolved over the past two decades. The article also proposes theoretical propositions that influence the provision and measurement of public value. With the acknowledgement that there is no widely accepted definition of public value, the views of various authors on what this concept entails and how to go about creating it are explored. The article focuses on the various frameworks to measure public value, including the contributions of Moore (1995), Meynhardt (2017) and Faulkner and Kaufman (2017) in terms of the most appropriate approach to measure public value as identified for this study. The methodology involves a critical desktop research in terms of a conceptual analysis of the various frameworks to measure public value to develop the most appropriate approach to measure public value.