Ethics and Public Value(s)—Finnish Cities’ Participation Model—Background and Practices

The increasing emphasis on public value represents new thinking. It gives special recognition to the government’s role as guarantor of public value and highlights municipal citizenship as well as democratic, collaborative governance. It questions, how the public sector should contribute to the common good and to the public interest and the altruism, human dignity and fairness values behind it. The idea of public value was first seen as a way of conceptualising strategy in public sector analogously to that of private value in the market sector. Current thinking has however moved beyond this traditional sectoral division and beyond the view of public administration as it was seen in New Public Management in that the public value approach now conceptualises a notion of value beyond the typical NPM rhetoric of efficiency and effectiveness. Deliberative democratic values in particular are seen as important here as individual residents are viewed as active public problem-solvers, co-designers and co-producers of the services they consume. Thus this approach now sees public value emerging from inclusive dialogue and deliberation. This chapter outlines the background to, discussion of and models supporting participatory democracy, particularly in the context of the Finnish urban environment. The text is therefore linked to the issue of reforming the operating models of municipal democracy and advances this theme within the aforementioned context from the theoretical background and concepts to the City of Helsinki participation model. The aim is to provide an overview of the participation discussion and how it is linked to urban development and policies and, ultimately, to the discussion on public value.