Doing Public Good?

Private Actors, Evaluation, and Public Value

R. Pablo Guerrero O., Peter Wilkins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351521888
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book examines the contributions of non-public organizations, such as foundations, philanthropies, charities, non-governmental organizations, private businesses, and entrepreneurs to public goods and services. Too often the impact of the contributions of such private actors are overlooked. However, they are playing an increasing role in meeting societal needs across the developing world.Doing Public Good? lays out key elements that need to be considered in evaluating the net results achieved by these private actors. It uses case studies and analysis to show how to answer such questions as: Is it working? How do they and the public know they are doing good? And how to improve? Such questions are particularly important since little is known about the net results of private avenues for delivering public value.The contributors conclude that "doing good" organizations need to be more transparent and accountable regarding their operations and achievements. The book suggests perspectives on how better monitoring and evaluation systems can improve their accountability.

Part I
Concepts, Questions, and Context

1
The Provision and Evaluation of Public Services by Nonpublic Actors: Concepts and Questions

Andrew Gray

The Stimulus to Inquiry

From its establishment in the 1980s the International Evaluation Research Group has sought specifically to study and advance the cause of policy evaluation from an international comparative perspective (Rist 1989 was the first, Furubo, Rist and Speer 2013 the latest). Not only has the succession of studies found that national experiences differ, but that changes introduced to the wider system of policy formulation and implementation have also impacted the evaluation process.

The starting point for this study is our observation that these changes include a notable increase around the world in the provision of public goods and services by non-governmental organizations. These providers include charities, voluntary groups, philanthropic organizations, social businesses, entrepreneurs, the private corporate sector, and probably others we have not yet identified. The private provision of public goods and services is not new. Many of these providers have been in the business for decades, some for centuries. What is new is the increased provision, influence on public policy, and in turn public dependency on it. It appears that in some cases this increase is a product of governments finding that their own resources are constrained; they thus turn to other organizations to make a greater contribution to public well-being. In other instances, these organizations have filled the gaps left by the degradation of government provision in war and geophysical disaster. In yet others, the traditional provision by such enterprises is growing as a response to rising demand as economies expand.

Whatever the drivers, the increase in nongovernmental provision of public services raises issues of socioeconomic policy and politics including the:

• Share of tax revenues consumed by these enterprises as proxy agents for governments;
• Distinctive business models of trading on moral goodwill, philanthropic capitalism, and social entrepreneurship as alternatives to traditional government provision and the way these models relate to existing and other governmental provision;
• Stewardship of public goods and services, including to the vulnerable, in the hands of third parties;
• Targeted and affirmative action interventions that challenge state commitments to equity and other social values;
• Evaluation of these contributions by the organizations themselves and those who may commission them.

Questions of Curiosity

Q1: What is the public good that nongovernmental providers purport to contribute?

Our starting point is the espoused values that the enterprises seek explicitly to bring to public well-being and by which, perhaps, they seek to legitimize their association with the wider community of public service. Thus, we are not limiting ourselves to what economists call “public goods.” Rather we are interested more broadly in what is sometimes termed “public value.”

In his book Creating Public Value, Moore (1995) explores the construct of public value and draws out two dimensions of generic application that are worth considering here. The first is the value that results from the delivery of direct benefits to persons or groups. This is the immediate value brought by vaccinations provided, hostel beds for the homeless, water wells and purification systems installed and reflected in social entities by rates of infant mortality, reoffending, literacy, and so on. The second is more systemic: the value added to society or collective public good. This is often manifested in hard infrastructure but is at least as importantly reflected in the development of softer assets such as economic, political, or social capacity. Economic capacity includes market development; political capacity includes more robust governance as well as enhanced esteem of political organizations; and social capacity includes collective organizing for common purpose.

Thus, this first question reflects a curiosity in the values, ethos, and philosophy of nongovernmental contributions to public well-being however these come to be made.

Q2: What rationalities underpin their activities?

We mean here the reasoning that underpins an enterprise’s decisions and actions and thus influences, even governs, what it does and does not, and how it behaves and does not behave. For Diesing (1962) reasoning “takes account of the possibilities and limitations of a given situation and recognizes it so as to produce, or increase, or preserve, some good.” His seminal work is often overlooked but is worth using here for its diagnostic potential especially in comparative contexts.

Diesing’s analysis identified five types of such substantive reasoning:

Technical rationality is the instrumental reasoning by which means are chosen in terms of their capacity to realize ends. This presumes ends as preeminent, means as instrumental. It can be argued that in most public services means and ends are often ambiguous and evenly prioritized—especially where it may be easier to forge agreement on means rather than ends.

Economic rationality selects and evaluates both ends and means explicitly by reference to their utilities in circumstances of scarcity. Thus it is the reasoning of economizing and adding net value.

Legal rationality is that of acting consistently with rules that specify responsibilities of commission and omission, of due process, and regularity. It thus underpins both the substance of the decision and the manner in which it is to be regarded. As the rationality that regulates differences and order in social entities (the rule of law), it has been perhaps the single most dominant influence on the achievement of public good in Western governance. Nongovernmental organizations are bound by it; indeed, most of the nineteenth-century gains in public welfare were gained through private organizations complying with new legally enacted responsibilities. Of late, however, we have seen how corporations that cross legal jurisdictions exploit inconsistencies in these laws between countries.

Social rationality is that of social cohesion and integration. Thus an action is socially rational if it furthers the social integration of the entity in question and irrational if it degrades it. While Diesing observes that it is often unconscious in decisions, it is often prominent in collective action empowered through stakeholder collective effort.

Political rationality takes social rationality into the political system: an action is politically rational if it furthers the integration of the decision-making system, but irrational if it degrades it. (Note here that political rationality has a more technically precise meaning than that of common usage in which it refers to political preference.) Thus choices and actions will be different when coalitions of support have to be mobilized and maintained (as integrated entities) in contrast to when political support may be depended on.

To these we may add ecological rationality—consistency with sustainability. In a 1982 interview, Diesing said he would add to his classification in recognition of changes in society during the preceding twenty years (Hartwig 2006). Thus a decision will embody ecological rationality if it is predicated on sustaining both the activity and the environment in which it is located.

These rationalities (however expressed depending on context and classification) are manifested in the patterns of organizational decision and action. Thus, the expression of this question reflects an empirical curiosity in the rationalities-in-use by those non-governmental organizations contributing to public good. We might be interested both in the different emphases that nongovernmental contributions place on these rationalities and in the consistency of these emphases with those placed by organizations with which they interact in making their contributions.

Q3: What arrangements do they use to govern their activities?

The next field of curiosity we have identified in our discussion is the arrangements in these nongovernmental providers of public goods and services for (1) allocating authority and function, (2) establishing and maintaining rights and obligations and (3) formulating and realizing policies. We call these arrangements “governance” and we are interested in the extent to which they are consistent with the creation of public value by nongovernmental providers of public goods and services.

Governance, however, is a slippery term. Rhodes (1997) brought this out well. He identified governance being used to convey a variety of phenomena:

1. minimal or enabling (rather than providing) state;
2. “good governance” prescriptions embracing independence, efficiency, accountability, and rule of law;
3. policy steering models of “new” public management;
4. instruments of corporate (financial) control;
5. systems of “interacting interventions”; and
6. self-organizing networks.

And we could add:

(g) “quality assurance” from the notion of clinical governance.

This was a painstaking and scholarly exposition. But what did Rhodes do with his multiple usages? Simply metaphorically threw his hands up in the air in intellectual despair and plumped for (f) self-organizing networks, remarking that “The term ‘governance’ refers to a change in the meaning of government, referring to a new process of governing” (15). While it may be empirically the case that networks are a new process of governing (although some medievalists may challenge that argument), they are simply another form of governance; they do not constitute governance.

We can support this assertion if we go back into the history of the concept at least in the English language. This reveals an explicit usage in political science from the nineteenth century beginning with Charles Plummer (1885) who used the term governance to re-title Fortescue’s fifteenth-century work “The Difference between an Absolute and a Limited Monarchy.” Such usage of governance to refer to the arrangements of governing became orthodox including in Sidney Low’s seminal text in 1904, The Governance of England, and among later British constitutional historians. (Non-Brits, please note: the lack of a written UK constitution has provided an enduring stimulus for a whole industry of constitutional historians from political science rather than public law.)

We may also see something similar if we go back to analyze commonalities in the different literature constructions identified by Rhodes. We find that whatever the particular construction or context of the usage, the essential elements have been widely shared: the arrangements by which social entities provide for the allocation of authority and function, establish and maintain rights and obligations, and formulate and realize policies.

This commonality is not surprising for we are looking here at arrangements intrinsic to all social entities. Thus, the various notions identified by Rhodes are particular forms of governance rather than definitions of its essence. To define governance as any one of these usages is to allow a particular species to take over the genus. This explains at least in part why we now have a slippery concept.

Simply stated, the arrangements that constitute governance are relational. The patterns in these relationships give governance its various modes. An earlier analysis of the commonalties in these relationships explicated three ideal modes of governance (Gray 2004).

The command mode of governance is based on the rule of law emanating from a sovereign body and delivered through a scalar chain of superior and subordinate authority. The legitimacy for actions under command governance lies in their being within the bounds prescribed through due process by the institution. The strength of command lies in the efficiency and effectiveness of control and accountability. The weakness is in its rigidity and conservatism in the face of changing environments. Note that to be effective as governance, command requires a well-enshrined respect for the rule of law both in formulation and observance.

The communion mode of governance is a relationship based on an appeal to common values and creeds. In this mode, the legitimacy for actions lies in consistency with the understandings, protocols, and guiding values of shared frames of reference. The strength of this governance lies in the guidance afforded by shared values through different environments. The weakness stems from its insularity from those environments and a consequent failure to adapt its normative order. Note that to be effective as governance communion requires a culture of trust.

The contract mode of governance is based on an inducement-contribution exchange agreed to by parties. Here the legitimacy derives from the terms of the agreed exchange (i.e., the contract, or at least its interpretations). The strengths of contract as governance lie in the predetermined life of the contract, the motivation to perform up to contract expectations and the consequent high probabilities that planning assumptions will be acted on. The weaknesses can be traced to the tendency of contracts to reduce behavior to a common denominator (that specified in the contract) and the difficulty in the face of changing circumstances to alter specifications without undue cost. Note that to be effective as governance, contract requires a market of demand and supply, subject to contract regulation, and an experience and capacity to exercise choice.

This use of the terms governance mode is diagnostic, to ascertain the pattern of such systemic arrangement in use, rather than normative, as a desirable mode which may or may not be adopted. The modes are ideal types, abstracted deductively from the premise of governance. In practice the modes take effect in combinations that fluctuate over time and context. Generalizing, we may observe a traditional predominance of command forms of governance in the provision of public goods and services by government organizations. This has been particularly marked in security services, if less so in the provision of personal services. However, both communion and contract modes have been used from as far back as we have evidence; communion, for example, in professionalized provision and in mutual collaborative ventures, and contract in the long-standing practice by government of procuring goods and services.

So, none of this is new in essence even if the relative emphases have been changing. Thus our question here expresses a curiosity in the patterns of governance in use in the nongovernmental contributions to public good. We are interested in the different emphases that nongovernmental contributions place on these modes. But this is not just a question about the internal governance of these organizations; it extends to how they relate externally to and are consistent with others in the supply chain and how they provide accountability to the respective agents and stewards.

Q4: What are the arrangements for organizational self-evaluation and for evaluation of contributions by those who commission contributions?

Arising from the prior questions and reflecting a core interest of the International Evaluation Research Group, this question seeks empirically to establish how these nongovernmental providers of public goods and services evaluate their contributions It also asks how governments, international organizations, and other principals (i.e., those that commission the goods and services) evaluate these organizations. These are questions about the philosophical and methodological approach to evaluation, about how evidence is identified and constructed, and about the role of evaluation.

The Group’s experience has shown that the meanings and interpretations of evaluation can reflect important differences in professional and political cultures (see all our volumes!). Nevertheless, at its simplest, there is agreement that evaluation may be seen as (a) the ex post assessment of a policy or program’s achievement against objectives. The literature demonstrates, however, that some would extend this definition to encompass (b) ex ante appraisal, (c) program monitoring, and (d) meta-evaluation (the evaluation of evaluation itself).

Throughout its work the Group has in practice adopted a broad conceptualization that embraces all these exemplars. There seems to be no reason not to sustain this approach in the current study especially as it explores new territories of public policy and practice. That does not prevent focusing on specific aspects of evaluation. At the same time it allows for even more variants that may have been ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Part I: Concepts, Questions, and Context
• Part II: Cases
• Part III: Conclusions
• Contributors
• Index