Public Values

Public values are generally defined as those ideals held common by members of a society, including common rights, proscriptions against certain behaviors, and shared aspirations of individuals as members of the society as a whole. Public values are the fundamental secular imperatives about the rights and prerogatives to which society members should be entitled and on which government action and their public policies should be based, according to Barry Bozeman's 2007 work Public Values and Public Interest: Counterbalancing Economic Individualism. With respect to science policy in general and nanotechnology policy specifically, public values are important because they address public interests, thus setting the standards for beneficial societal outcomes expected from public investment.

The term public values was first formally introduced in the 1990s by Mark Moore in his effort to create a unifying concept for strategic management for public administration in the United States. In this 1995 treatise titled Creating Public Value, Moore described public values as being measured by three tests, in that they must be (1) substantively valuable and produce benefits for beneficiaries, (2) politically sustainable, and (3) operationally feasible. Recent scholars, such as R.F. Smith, have argued that much more work and discourse is needed to build on Moore's early work to ensure that the concept has greater meaning and use in many natural and social science policy institutions, academic settings and disciplines, and public service.

In the late 1990s, Bozeman launched a robust research agenda and exploration of public values and its mapping to science policy. The result has been a wide variety of attempts to differentiate between public values and public interest in particular policy institutions or domains. For example, Mary Feeney and Bozeman explored public values for flu vaccine policy, and T.B. Jorgensen and Bozeman developed a public values inventory for a specific public administration entity in Denmark in 2007. More recently, underlying structures of public values for nanotechnology have been explored using a data set resulting from content analysis public documents, such as in the forthcoming work by E. Fisher and colleagues. Several challenges remain for developing a definition of public values including the ambiguity about values for public policy in general and the necessary sacrifice of private values for the public good, according to Bozeman.

Bozeman also argues that there may be no need for a single definition of public values and that it is best explored in political context consistent with prior studies. Further, Bozeman suggests that the definition of public values is based on a normative consensus about (1) the rights, benefits and prerogatives to which citizens should and should not be entitled; (2) the obligations of citizens to society, the state and one another; and (3) the principles on which governments and policies should be based. As predicted by Bozeman, the concept has enough breadth and plasticity to be useful in many academic domains of science policy. As an example, H.S. Banzhaf embraces the essence of public values in his manuscript on environmental issues and land use by noting that while “private markets are an efficient way to allocate many resources, they can fail to take into account the public benefits flowing outside market transactions.”

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