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Among the many admirable aims of the environmental movement,
the one that strikes me as most useful to those in public services is
captured by the motto, “Think globally, act locally.†In a public
services career spanning more than 35 years, I have had a chance to
look at public service systems in the Americas, Europe and Africa.
I have been forcibly struck by the need to give substantial weight
to the local political and cultural context of a particular system. You
ignore a genuine understanding of these features at your peril:
You, the public services administrator or elected official, must be
seen to listen and pay attention to local priorities. In other words,
act locally. At the same time, my experience in South Africa and
Canada (which in key ways face vastly different challenges) and
elsewhere is that there are some major global economic, human
and social drivers that all politicians and public service administrators
need to take account of in their engagement with their citizens.
Think globally.
In Unlocking Public Value, Marty Cole and Greg Parston offer
public services practitioners a unique tool to help them capture the
mix of goals or outcomes, some reflecting local, some global, concerns,
and measure performance in attaining these outcomes.
Providing a framework and step-by-step process for defining these
outcomes is one of the key achievements of the book. Since nearly
all meaningful outcomes come at a cost to taxpayers, the measuring
of outcomes occurs in the context of tracking not just costs, but
cost-effectiveness as well.
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