What are public values?
Public values are guiding principles for ethical and accountable behaviour in public service. While their precise definition is debated, they are understood as providing an ethical framework for policymaking to improve social outcomes.
The Nolan principles (honesty, integrity, objectivity, accountability, selflessness, openness and leadership) are commonly cited, but other values, such as trust, are crucial. Applying values should permeate all levels of public organisations, not just senior management.
How do public officials implement values?
Public officials, especially senior managers, must understand and articulate how public values create public value. While the Nolan principles serve as a foundation, diverse public professions bring their own unique values, which must be adaptable across different organisational levels and practices.
Public officials often bring prior professional experience, influencing their understanding of public values, so a flexible approach is required to accommodate diverse interpretations.
An example is the growth of core value statements, including fairness, accountability, citizen-centricity and excellence. However, translating formal statements into practice requires interpretation across varied contexts.
Do officials understand values at the levels of public sector practice?
Public values are now central to senior officials’ skills and knowledge, and seen as crucial for effective public service delivery and addressing complex problems. Training and education are essential for senior officials to understand public values and ethics across different organisational levels. Standards such as the Nolan principles and similar frameworks (ie, Ireland’s Standards in Public Office or Canada’s Conflict of Interest Act) provide ethical guidance for navigating competing values.
Although it is impossible to understand every perspective, an understanding of the breadth of values and their application is beneficial. Senior staff are often embedded in strategy-making, so an overview of other value perspectives – and how they create wider public value – is useful.
Values inculcation is important for understanding across governance levels and links between public values; professional training and knowledge exchange programmes and collaborative learning initiatives are beneficial. Sustaining opportunities that exist, and revitalising others, is crucial for training senior officials to understand public values in diverse contexts.
How can officials identify opportunities to encourage value sharing?
Opportunities for in-depth discussions on public values – especially in formal settings – are limited, and dialogue could improve understanding.
The current landscape is complex, with personal, professional, public and social values across multiple governance levels. Enhancing dialogue and reflection on public values, including frontline staff, is vital. One area that is rarely discussed in busy organisations is the link between values and emotions.
Secondly, addressing complex social issues requires continuous discussion across organisational and service boundaries. Diverse professional values and agency cultures require negotiation to co-create value.
Multi-agency responses need to acknowledge value systems, assess power dynamics and tensions, and adapt to changing contexts.
