People often associate ethics with the brakes in a car. When you want to give gas, an ethicist comes along and put on the brakes. Yet, ethics is more like the steering wheel: it determines where you want to go. Or, to put it another way, ethics is the vital motor of public governance. I am working on a book project about making the all-important dimension of value more visible in public governance.

The first four chapters of the book are about the study of public governance from a Value-Based Governance (VBG) Perspective; how to conduct such studies, and what we know about values in Western public governance like which values conflict and what strategies are availed to deal with that. The fifth concept chapter – the (theoretical) paper I would like to present in Zagreb - is about what VBG looks like in practice. In VBG public problems are solved while prudently dealing with tensions between (potentially) conflicting values; it is about the normative dimension – the value-laden basis – of public governance, it brings values to fore. Spicer: “public administrators need to go beyond the science-based instrumental rationalism and determinism that characterize too much of our field and to recognize that the management of conflicting values is an essential part of their responsibilities.”(Spicer 2010, 10).

VBG is morally important: there is much power in public governance and the impact on everyone’s lives is enormous. There can be no nonarbitrary way of making choices among values (Stewart 2006), and yet there is hardly any weighing of values going on; currently in public governance, the deliberation about values remains under the radar (Putters 2021). And as we know from recent scandals, things can go horribly wrong when value conflicts are not dealt with properly (Koppenjan 2022). When the focus is on (conflicting) interest there is a tendency to view governance as a zero sum game. This tendency is much smaller when values are concerned: they can hardly be understood in terms of trade-offs. The purpose of public governance is to realize values.

The two principal stages in VBG are:

1. Identifying values and value conflicts

2. Weighing the values and deliberating strategies to deal with the value conflicts

Public administrators pay a crucial role in VBG. Their focus should be less than currently on the technical execution of policies, and more on strategic thinking (Putters 2022a). They should facilitate adequate value choices: focus on the value conflicts and present these to the political executives – weigh all the values, not just effectiveness and efficiency but insights, opinions, and dilemmas too, and present and discuss an overview of this. They should weigh the different coping strategies, including the advantages and disadvantages and conditions.