Public value governance and strategic public management

Abstract

This chapter explores what public value governance might imply for strategic public management. In other words, how might strategic management create public value and advance the common good, when doing so requires focusing on challenges that exceed the capacity of any single organization. We argue that strategy management-at-scale, embracing collaboration and less formal co-alignments, can be effective in such cases. Strategic management for organizations is now standard practice for businesses, government agencies, and nonprofit organizations around the world. Strategy management-at-scale is far less common, but is needed to address issues, challenges, or problems that spill well beyond the boundaries of any single organization’s capacities to address. Such issues occur within a shared-power, no-one-wholly-in-charge environment and demand a response from multiple organizations. We discuss two complementary approaches to strategy management-at-scale: collaboration, and especially the popular collective impact (CI) approach; and community organizing, coalition building, and advocacy.