Walter Castelnovo
Thus, for instance, an individual can simultaneously be a taxpayer that“ funds” public administration, a“ consumer” that uses the services delivered by public administration and a civil servant working in a government agency. This can determine the emergence of conflicts of interests that must be considered in evaluating a government initiative from the point of view of the public value it delivers to citizens. Actually, as a user of the services a citizen would like to receive better services from the public administration. However, this could determine a higher cost for service delivery( at least on the short term), which could mean that the citizen has either to pay a higher cost for accessing the services or to be prone to incur in a higher level of taxation. Similarly, as a civil servant a citizen might want a higher wage, which is a private value for him; however, this could mean that public administration has to spend more for salaries and this, as a consequence, could force public administration either to invest less in improving the quality of the services( which means less value for the citizen as user) or to higher the level of taxation( which means less value for the citizen as taxpayer).
For this reason, to understand how an e‐Government initiative could impact public value a careful identification of the stakeholders involved, of their interests and of their mutual relationships is needed. This includes also the identification of how the different stakeholders could be impacted by an e‐Government initiative and what are the aspects of public value that could be more relevant for them( Castelnovo & Simonetta 2008; Castelnovo 2013; Rowley 2011; Cresswell & Sayogo 2012).
4. Evaluating the public value delivered by e‐Government initiatives
The stakeholder perspective is the corner stone of public value assessment( Cresswell & Sayogo 2012); however, there are two aspects that must be carefully considered when applying it to the evaluation of e‐ Government initiatives. On the one hand, citizens usually play different stakeholder roles and the same individual can simultaneously play conflicting roles with respect to an e‐Government initiative. It follows that an e‐Government initiative could determine a positive impact on citizens as they play a specific role while some less positive( or even negative) consequences could derive for them as playing different stakeholder roles. On the other hand, what represents a value for a stakeholder group not necessarily can be considered as a public value; stakeholder roles are played by individuals and the value delivered to specific stakeholders could be a private value for the individuals playing those roles.
Public value is strictly related to collective and societal interests instead; the value possibly created by government initiatives“ cannot be assessed solely at the level of‘ customer’ or a single organization but needs to include the value for the wider population and also(...) for future generations of citizens.”( Hartley 2011, p. 181) Even in case a government initiative is explicitly targeted toward a specific stakeholder group, it should be designed to deliver, either as a direct or as an indirect consequence of its implementation, a value also to other stakeholders( or, at least, to avoid possible negative impacts on other stakeholder groups). This makes that initiative consistent with the achievement of collective and societal interests, which is the necessary condition for it to create a public value.
This requirement characterizes the public value approach and can be related to two fundamental principles of Edward Freeman’ s“ managing for stakeholders”, namely( Freeman, Velamuri and Moriarty 2006, p. 7):
• stakeholders interests go together over time; managers must keep the stakeholder interests in balance, hopefully mutually reinforcing each other
• seek solutions to issues that satisfy multiple stakeholders simultaneously; managers need to find ways to develop programs, policies, strategies, even products and services that satisfy multiple stakeholders simultaneously
Based on the observations above, a public value and stakeholder‐based evaluation of an e‐Government initiative needs to assume a whole‐of‐system approach ‐ that is, an approach that simultaneously considers all the stakeholders that can be impacted by it, either directly or indirectly. A whole‐of‐system approach makes it possible to better evaluate the distribution of the benefits that possibly derive from an e‐Government initiative, thus avoiding the risk of evaluating as positive an initiative that while delivering value to specific stakeholders, determines less positive( or even negative) results for other stakeholders. For this approach to evaluation the crucial point is the identification of a comprehensive list of stakeholders and of the possible benefits e‐Government could deliver to each of them. The evaluation of a specific e‐Government initiative can then be based on the analysis of how the benefits deriving from it are distributed among different stakeholder
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