A few weeks ago, I wrote about the challenges governments face in balancing the needs and expectations of the individual being served, the collective needs of society, the concerns of taxpayers, and political agenda of government.  My last entry expanded upon this by sharing some insights from our recent Global Cities Forums on what citizens are actually saying about what they want and expect from their government and how it should improve the quality of their lives.

This week I want to continue this discussion by outlining a framework we have formulated as a result of these forums to promote a more active relationship between citizens and their governments. We’ve introduced a Service Value Governance Framework representing a more publicly engaged model of governance, one that truly connects people—as citizens, service users and taxpayers—with those whom they elect to lead them and to shape and direct their public services.

 

Derived from the common concerns and ambitions of all of the groups of Global Cities Forum participants and the principles of public value they defined, the framework is built around four components:

1.       Outcomes—  The purpose and mission of public service provision should be the actual improvements they produce in the lives of the people they serve—such as better health and wider learning—and not simply the amount of service produced or economic efficiency achieved. Traditional measures of public-service performance—such as student-teacher ratios or arrest rates or numbers of hospital beds, for example—no longer satisfy the public demand for improvement. What matters is the actual difference public-service organizations make in the lives of the people they serve.People—certainly the participants of the Global Cities Forum—want the realities of their lives to shape government services and to provide the strategic direction and operational alignment across government organizations.  Managing through a focus on outcomes is a means of ensuring that multilateral strategies and holistic solutions are applied to the conditions or issues that most affect local people.

 

2.       Balance – The people with whom we spoke believe that governments should tailor service provision to meet the wide range of different needs across the population. People are increasingly accustomed to private-sector services that respond flexibly and discriminatingly to their individual demands and see little reason why government cannot do the same. As service users, people want more choice in the type and means of service delivery.However, it is also important to make explicit the challenge of balancing choice and flexibility with fairness and common good. It will not happen intuitively; it requires clarity and analysis, even if political judgments have to weigh one side of the balance more heavily than the other.

 

3.       Engagement— An overwhelmingly consistent finding from the Global Cities Forum is participants’ desire to see government offer more opportunities to involve people in setting priorities and plans for public services to deliver improvements in their own lives. Moreover, they want to be able to do this on an ongoing basis—not simply through rare public consultations or superficial user satisfaction surveys. Further, when government enables people to play a greater role in setting priorities and planning public services, and as people have increasingly more means to engage with government in a consequential manner, individuals will be empowered to assume more responsibility for improvements in their own lives.However, engagement must go beyond asking people what they want. It must also include active programs of educating people about their rights and responsibilities and initiatives to enroll them as active partners in improving outcomes.  Governments must work to ensure that the engagement they have with people is as consequential as possible. Deliberative events such as the Global Cities Forum empower local people to consider and discuss issues with others from their wider communities. Consequently, such events can provide richer and sometimes surprising insight. Clearly, the Global Cities Forum reached only a tiny subset of the population of each city, but as governments extend public-engagement activities more widely and more frequently, greater numbers of people will become involved and the benefits of their engagement will multiply.

 

4.       Accountability—Across the eight Global Cities Forum events, we found that all people want more information from government. Our research also shows that high-performing public-service organizations are using performance management data as a powerful tool for engaging people and other stakeholders.  Sharing performance information with people can help build understanding of government’s constraints and limitations.Therefore, our findings indicate government must move beyond simple information sharing and make information such as performance and budgeting data available and actionable. In making the right types of information easily accessible to the public and implementing mechanisms to help people take action, the public is able to play an active role in holding officials accountable, improving service delivery to the community and supporting program funding.

 

These four components provide meaning and a language with which to clearly articulate a relationship that is about genuine engagement of people in their governance—not one that is merely about voting in elections, answering surveys or paying taxes, as important as these things are. We consider this type of engagement critical to governments achieving high performance

 

I’d love to hear your thoughts on both the various components of this framework and how emerging technology could be applied to further benefit Canadian citizens in future. 

 

Tags: Governance, Public Service, Service delivery