Authors: Danielle Thornton, The Social Research Centre, Stephen Cuttriss, The Social Research Centre The concept of value is at the heart of evaluation, yet conventional approaches to assessing value tend to focus on effectiveness, utility or efficiency as defined by commissioning agencies and governments. Realist approaches can help push back against the insistence that programs meet narrowly conceived outcome metrics or return on investment but may still fail to capture the range of social benefits generated. The invisibility of these forms of value to policymakers and economists can lead to perverse outcomes: to the recommissioning of ‘effective’ programs of little obvious benefit to participants or the broader community, and the defunding of initiatives that may meet community needs but not policy agendas.
This disconnection, between the types of programs communities want and need, and the programs that get commissioned, feeds into cynicism and distrust of the political class and government as a whole, and left unchecked, risks weakening the social contract on which democratic governance rests.
In this context the concept of public value, that is the social value generated by governments when they act in the public interest, offers an alternative framework grounded in democratic values. Whether as a practical means of accounting for value where impact cannot be quantified, or as a form of evaluative practice which centres the lived experience of citizens, public value asks that we assess programs not only on the terms set by governments, but also the extent to which they contribute to our collective wellbeing.
Drawing on lessons from an evaluation of a program designed to promote respectful sexual relationships among young people, this paper explores the applicability of public value as a framework for accounting for a wider range of social impacts and a method for making an assessment not of ‘value for money’, but the benefits generated for and on behalf of the public.
