Argentinian President Javier Milei recently gifted Elon Musk a literal chainsaw to symbolically aid in the destruction of public institutions designed to help United States citizens. This is not the first time private sector mindsets have been employed to make public services more like the private sector, nor is it likely to be the last.
Public services need to work better, but this will not be achieved by pretending that they are the same as services delivered by the private sector. In an efficient market, buyers of goods and services determine what that thing is worth by what they buy and what they are willing to pay. Most public services don’t work that way, and so we need a different way to organise the relationship between the service and the person who benefits. One approach to organising public services is through the intentional cultivation of a public service culture, complete with its own values, to ensure that public servants work to meet the needs of society.
The study of how public services are organised and managed is called public administration. Public administration has been studied for thousands of years all around the world, but the modern Western study of public administration is often dated to the late 19th century, particularly the work of Woodrow Wilson in the US and Max Weber in Europe. Despite being an ancient art, public administration is often insecure and tries to make sense of uniquely public problems by drawing from private sector analogies. Perhaps this is because policies are decided by politicians appealing to everyday citizens who find it much easier to relate to buying and selling in a market. Perhaps it is because the anti-tax and anti-regulation lobby has aimed to promote a story that private sector practices are good, and public sector ones bad. In either case, what we are frequently left with is public servants trying to squeeze into ill-fitting private sector clothes.
Traditional public administration tried to reconstruct, by analogy, the factory assembly lines of the Industrial Revolution, where rather than artisan cobblers, workers on a production line would each complete a repeated task to mass produce identical shoes. Similarly, public servants would efficiently complete standard operating procedures with minimal discretion to ensure that all citizens received the services they were entitled to. Every public servant did their part, but no one was responsible for making things better or for meeting the needs of the citizen. A lack of discretion made it particularly difficult to help individuals and families who didn’t fit neatly into boxes.
The 1980s and 1990s saw many changes in public administration, again inspired by private sector analogues. One analogy was in viewing public agencies as ‘contracting’ with the State, with variations around the English-speaking world including New Zealand’s Public Finance Act 1989, the US Government Performance and Results Act 1993, Australia’s Commonwealth Financial Accountability Act 1997 and the UK Public Sector Modernisation Act 2000. It was imagined that governments could specify the quality and quantity of goods and services to be produced and ‘purchase’ them from agencies, in the same way that a contract could be used to govern the purchase of goods and services in the private sector. In exchange, public managers were to be given the freedom to organise public services in the most efficient way possible.
Alas, the purchasing specification was inevitably incomplete – it is impossible to specify all the different ways that a public service should be delivered to meet all the public expectations of them. As a result, some public managers became proficient in meeting their own Key Performance Indicators without improving lives. Individual performance goals could be pursued by improving services for the ‘middle’ but once again ignoring cross-cutting problems or complex cases that didn’t fit neatly into a single box.
At least, some public servants behaved this way. Others behaved in ways that were unexpected. In the last 30 years, we have seen some public servants using the new discretion afforded to them in the 1980s and 1990s not to meet some artificial performance indicators but instead to focus on how they could help people. Public servants often choose their career based on a desire to make a difference and a commitment to a particular outcome or policy challenge. In the right context, this motivation is preserved, protected and nurtured. A culture develops, where behaving in the right way is expected and anything other than the highest standards of integrity and relentless pursuit of public value is seen as deviant. Others adopt these behaviours simply because ‘that is how things are done around here’.
New Zealand as a case study in values-driven public service
We know these pockets of public service culture and values exist. They pop up all over: nurses, social workers, teachers and many others largely ignoring their performance incentives and focusing instead on helping people in need. For example, recent New Zealand Public Service Commission’s Lifetime Achievement Awardwinners include ‘Mama’ Pam Osment, a corrections officer who spent decades helping prison inmates turn their life around, and Betty Hauraki, who grew up at a time where her native language, te reo Māori, was banned in schools, and then spent 50 years supporting Māori language revitalisation. Arguably the biggest challenge of contemporary public administration is to take these pockets and expand them, to make the best culture and values the norm.
In this respect, New Zealand becomes an interesting case study. Not because its public services are perfect, although they are often very good. But instead, because New Zealand went first and farthest in the 1980s to provide public servants with the discretion to innovate to achieve better public services. Some things worked, some things didn’t. The 1990s and early 2000s saw a real focus on performance specification and measurement, and an assumption that all problems would ultimately be solved by getting more precise with describing the quality and quantity of services. More recently, there has been a focus on culture and values – an environment in which doing the right things, for the right reasons, is the expectation. These values include things like ‘a spirit of service to the community’ – that is, being motivated by making a difference but being humble in knowing that public servants are there to serve others – or ‘stewardship’, understood in New Zealand as a proactive duty of care over the public resources that public servants manage on behalf of future generations.
How to build a culture of public service
Cultivating values perhaps sounds rather amorphous or even esoteric, but like any management approach, there are clear steps that can be taken. This begins at the start of a public service career: designing and advertising roles to attract those motivated by public service values and to repel those who aren’t. It involves intentionally selecting public servants who display the desired values. It involves designing processes for public servants to socialise with mentors and role models. It involves recognising and rewarding the display of those values, and taking advantage of the opportunity provided by failures to communicate and reset expectations. Most of all, it involves the conscious investment of time and effort, and persistence over many years. New Zealand from 2012–2023 provides an interesting example of the intentional effort to promote a values approach.
We can learn from things that go wrong and things that go right. When things go wrong, that tells us what not to do, but not necessarily what to do instead. I would argue that public administration has too often responded to failures from poor private sector analogues by attempting another, better, private sector analogy. Studying examples of where public services go right tells us that public servants are at their best when they are living the values of service. If public services are to be improved, as they must be, the solution isn’t to continue to force public servants into ill-fitting private sector clothes, but instead to make public servants more like (the best of) public servants.
Rodney Scott is an Adjunct Professor of Public Administration at the University of New South Wales, Australia, and was Chief Policy Advisor at the New Zealand Public Service Commission.
Contemporary Public Administration in New Zealand by Rodney Scott and Peter Hughes is available on Bristol University Press for £80.00 here.
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