Third part in a series leading up to the Public Services Summit in Stockholm in December

If we’re going to have a discussion about the future of the public sector, we need to have a discussion about its role and function.  What exactly is it we expect the public sector to do as it evolves into the 21^st century?  What are the challenges to which we want the public sector to be able to respond?  To be blunt, what exactly is the point of the public sector?

Traditionally, the public sector regulates, delivers public services and makes policy.  On top of that, it administers the business of government, performing a kind of housekeeping role that makes sure records are properly kept and decision-making processes are effectively managed.  In that sense, the public sector’s core business is the administration of the public work of a country or a state, region or city.

Over the past 30 years or so, these central ideas about the role and function of the public sector have been subjected to a program of intense and apparently ceaseless reform, some of which has questioned whether these functions remain valid and, if they do, whether they could be done differently.  Regulation has been challenged by new thinking about competition and choice, recognising that in some situations the pursuit of good outcomes for citizens, especially in key public services, can best be achieved not by more regulation but by increasing choice through competition.  Increasingly, public services are no long delivered by public servants or, at least directly, by public agencies.  Health care, education, roads, airports – many of the things we used to assume were exclusively or at least largely the responsibility of the public sector are now being delivered, and sometimes designed, by the private sector or by civil society organisations.

That’s not a new trend, of course, but the scope and intensity of these alternative delivery platforms has increased dramatically over the past 20 years.

So if the public sector is no longer doing the traditional public work it once did, what is it doing and, more importantly, what will it be doing into the future?

One way of framing the answer to that question is to define three core functions of the public sector – design, delivery and systemic accountability. 

Design

This is a function that could describe policy making, developing regulations or, more recently, the design of new regimes of choice and competition that, in turn, create the conditions in which public or private organisations can then operate. 

Taken at its broadest, the design function describes anything the public sector does to respond to a specific challenge, ranging from the broadest – lifting education standards or improving access to health care – to the most specific and practical – setting up a tax system or determining eligibility for pensions and benefits.

The public sector has always been a design institution.  The question is how that core function has evolved and how, over the next 20 years, we might expect it to change again to meet new demands for integrated solutions to complex public problems.

We’re also seeing an interesting trend in the application to public services of a range of design methods and perspectives which, always putting the user experience in the centre of the frame, seek to strip down public services and rebuild them to make them more successful and appealing.

Deliver

There was a period when most ‘public’ services were not delivered by the public sector, which really didn’t exist before the rise of mass, industrial-era government.  Gradually, though, as the search for scale and equity became more urgent, more services were taken on by the agencies of government, especially in key areas like health, education, post and telecommunications and public safety.

So the public sector became associated with a service delivery role – creating new organisations and platforms from which not just to mandate certain services, but actually to own and manage the means by which those services were delivered.

More recently, we’ve witness in many countries a shift away from this model to one where the public sector provisions and sometimes pays for services which are actually delivered by other organisations, either commercial or non-profit.

But away from the areas of direct service provision with which we’ve become familiar, you could argue that ‘delivery’ remains a key function of the public sector, if you also count those services, like regulation and justice, where ‘deliver’ is not always visible as a specific transaction. 

Manage the system

The third core function of the public sector is a little harder to define but is just as important.  It refers to the task of keeping the overall system of public governance not only running well and efficiently but responsive as well to new demands and expectations. 

So as well as playing a role designing and delivering (either directly or indirectly) good public policy and effective public services and programs, the public sector also has to manage the system itself. 

Do these three core functions make sense as a frame within which to discuss the future of the public sector?  Maybe they are too limited and you can think of better ways to think about what the public sector does and what the public sector is (or should be). 

One thought – it seems to me that the ‘design’ function of the public sector is becoming more and more prominent in determining both its role and its value. You just have to think about the current financial turmoil around the world or the rising demands for effective responses to climate change to get a sense of the enormous challenges of policy design which we are expecting the public sector to respond to.  Maybe in the next 20 years, the design function will become even more dominant, representing the single most significant contribution that the public sector will make to the big outcomes citizens seek – economic resilience, social inclusion and environmental sustainability?