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Public Money & Management
ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rpmm20
New development: Covid-19 and its
publics—implications for strategic management
and democracy
Alessandro Sancino , Christian Garavaglia , Mariafrancesca Sicilia &
Alessandro Braga
To cite this article: Alessandro Sancino , Christian Garavaglia , Mariafrancesca Sicilia & Alessandro Braga (2020): New development: Covid-19 and its publics—implications for strategic management and democracy, Public Money & Management, DOI: 10.1080/09540962.2020.1815380
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09540962.2020.1815380
Published online: 16 Sep 2020.
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New development: Covid-19 and its publics
—implications for strategic
management and democracy
Alessandro Sancino a, Christian Garavagliab, Mariafrancesca Sicilia cand Alessandro Braga d
a
The Open University, UK and University of Milan-Bicocca, Italy;bUniversity of Milan-Bicocca, Italy;cUniversity of Bergamo, Italy;
d
Independent consultant and lecturer on public management, USA
ABSTRACT
This article discusses the concept of‘publics’ and provides a case example related to Covid-19 to show the importance of strategically managing with and for publics. Specifically, the publics of local governance in lockdown are identified from two focus groups with local leaders conducted in Lombardy, Italy. Identifying, designing and visualizing publics is a key democratic and strategic choice with implications on the public values enacted.
IMPACT
Early results have shown that some individuals and organizations were affected disproportionately by the impacts of Covid-19, both for the better (for example higher profits for technology companies) and for the worse (for example higher mortality rates in BAME populations). By managing with and for publics, public managers and politicians could take more equitable decisions by visualizing trade-offs in public values and co-create better strategies by taking the perspective of those experiencing the effects of public decisions and public services.
KEYWORDS
Covid-19; democracy; local governance; public manager; publics; public value; public values; strategic
management
Public Money and Management recently published several articles that have advanced the field of public strategic management (for example Elliott,2020; Klijn & Koppenjan,2020; Kools & George,2020; Osborne et al., 2020). This article contributes to this ongoing debate by discussing the concept of‘publics’ and its relevance for public strategic management (Moore & Fung,2012). The concept of publics can advance strategic management by making the groups of individuals and organizational stakeholders directly affected by public decisions more transparent, for example by being more or less privileged (or penalized) as a consequence of those decisions. Moreover, by analysing the decisions (here intended broadly both as policies and strategies) with a publics lens, it is possible to debate the trade-offs in public values. By delaying the decision to lockdown a country, region/ state and/or city during Covid-19, for example, the publics of economic interests and entrepreneurs was considered more than the publics of the elderly or the most vulnerable people—thus prioritizing economic growth over health.
The concept of publics has been poorly developed so far in public strategic management and its implications for democracy have been neglected. In this article, we provide a case example related to Covid-19 to show the importance of strategically managing with and for publics.
We take the perspective of a local authority and we draw our illustrations from two focus groups
conducted with local leaders in Lombardy (Italy), the first region in Europe to face the Covid-19 outbreak and the hardest hit region in Italy. One of the authors is a mayor who was directly engaged in the management of Covid-19. Therefore, this article benefits from real experience in the management of the pandemic at the local level.
Covid-19, its publics and public value trade-offs
Drawing from Moore and Fung (2012), we define publics as‘groups of individuals and/or organizational stakeholders that are recognized as representative of some common interests, positions, values in a governmental arena’. Publics are not simply stakeholders, because they are the result of a political design (Barzelay, 2019), depending on how and if different individuals and organizational stakeholders are assembled or not into a publics. Crucial here is how publics are called into existence to understand and act in their own representation. Thus, publics might not exist, but come into existence through strategic management by politicians and/or managers, but possibly also by civil society leaders and media.
This concept is different from that of stakeholders in the fact that it is a second order concept. Different publics might be designed for different purposes and prioritized at different times or in different places. As
Benington (2009, p. 235) wrote: publics are not given but made, and they have to be continuously created and constructed. Hartley et al. (2019) pointed to the importance of using political astuteness to recognize and call into existence different publics as a key capability for public leaders.
However, publics are often not made transparent by politicians and public managers when taking strategic decisions and/or not properly considered when implementing those decisions. For example, first evidence suggests that some publics have been particularly hit by Covid-19. In the UK, ‘people living in more deprived areas have experienced Covid-19 mortality rates more than double those living in less deprived areas’ (Stripe, Head of Health Analysis, Office for National Statistics, 2020, p. 2). In both the UK and the US, preliminary data show that Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) populations, migrants and refugees, older and disabled people were disproportionately affected by the pandemic (for example Public Health England, 2020). This may signal, on the one hand, that the care of those publics was not a priority (with implications on some public values, for example social justice); and, on the other hand, the inability to strategically manage with and for different publics.
The example of the management of Covid-19 brought up that trade-offs in public values (for example health versus economy; nationalist isolation versus global solidarity) are inherent in any policy or managerial decision made by a public sector organization, especially in times of crisis (van der Wal,
2020). In the next section, we illustrate with an example how different publics may be constituted and how this strategic choice may reflect and/or prioritize some public values over others.
Local governance in lockdown and its key publics: illustrations from Italy
We organized two focus groups to collect different views from key local leaders. In both focus groups, we invited people who had played an active and crucial role during the management of the Covid-19 outbreak. We explained the concept of publics and asked them to identify and to deliberate on what were the relevant publics during the lockdown period. Deliberation implied that they should reach consensus on whether to include or not a given publics. The idea behind this choice was to generate and validate knowledge with our community of practice (see Carboni et al., 2019), which in this case was the system of local leaders.
In thefirst focus group (FG1), we involved seven key local leaders, all living and active in an Italian town in Lombardy: the mayor, a police commander, a social services manager, a physician, a priest (the Church has a very relevant role in the Italian third sector— see, for example, Pagani et al.,2020), a manager of a voluntary sector organization, and the director of the association representing small- and medium-size businesses operating in the town. The second group (FG2) was undertaken with six mayors of six municipalities located in Lombardy (Italy). Mayors, who in Italy are directly elected by citizens, play a key role in local governance (for example Sancino & Castellani, 2016). Both the focus groups were conducted with the members physically present in early July 2020, when the lockdown and most of the restrictions in Italy had been lifted.
Table 1 highlights a list of possible key publics during the lockdown phase from the perspective of local leaders and of a local authority. Clearly, in other contexts and from different perspectives, other publics may be identified.
Some key issues emerged from our focus groups. First, not all the publics have the same role. For example, some publics might have a more engaged role (for example volunteers). Second, some publics have a priority in terms of the attention and actions needed (for example people who have been diagnosed with Covid-19, people over 65 years old, children of school age). Third, each publics may need tailored information. Fourth, creating or not creating publics is an act of political design, with consequences on the public values enacted or not. For example, some relevant publics have not been identified. We conducted further research on local leadership and Covid-19 highlighting how the Table 1.The publics of local governance in lockdown.
List of key publics in lockdown as
identified by focus groups Key activities
People who have been diagnosed with Covid-19
Provide assistance and support People over 65 years old Prevention and support
Children of school age Ensure, in collaboration with schools, that each child has a device for attending school lessons Parents of school-age children Provide information and support
Volunteers Co-deliver essential public services to
the elderly, vulnerable people and people with Covid-19
Local businesses Provide information about central
government decrees regarding economic measures
Enquiring citizens Provide basic information and answer
citizens’ enquires (for example where to do basic shopping; when it was possible to go out)
Residential care homes Provide extra support to manage the higher risk of mortality
Health and care officials Exchange information, deliver protection devices
People who lost their jobs Support them with funds (for example vouchers to buy essential food) Employees in municipalities Ensure public services delivery and
manage the transition to smart working
Donors Organize platforms and tools for
collecting donations
pandemic ‘verticalized’ decisions, with the effect of crowding out elected councillors because all the main decisions were taken by the mayor. Fifth, taking the perspective of ‘publics’ can spur creativity. For example, thinking about the elderly in lockdown, some mayors decided to organize the home delivery of books by the municipal library; one mayor gave all women over 65 a sunflower seed asking them to grow it at home as an expression of closeness from the municipal administration and a sign of hope for the future.
Discussion: active publics as alternative to data analytics
Identifying, designing and visualizing publics is a key democratic and strategic choice. Importantly, this choice can uncover the position of politicians and/or public managers on fundamental public values. For example, having managed (or not managed) to create public value for people living in deprived areas, or for children isolated at home, had consequences on the impacts of Covid-19.
In this respect, we believe that it is in strategically managing with and for different publics that public values can be enacted and public value co-created (Bryson et al.,2017). The objection here is that during crises there might be no time for debate, but technological opportunities offer new democratic possibilities to gather many and diverse views almost in real time (Bloom & Sancino, 2019). To safeguard representativeness, mini-publics representative of the publics identified can be recruited and invited to work with elected politicians and public managers (Bevir,2013).
Of course, the concept of publics is not unproblematic, as well as the political processes behind who identifies, designs and visualizes publics and for what purposes. For example, politicians and/ or public managers may ‘manufacture’ civil society (Brandsen et al.,2017); public managers may take on an overly political role (Rhodes & Wanna,2007).
However, we think that the concept of publics can advance strategic management in at least three ways:
. Focusing on publics can highlight the collective, relational and representative dimension of being citizens complementing the individual focus on citizens as users, customers and consumers.
. Focusing on managing with deliberative publics can avoid a technocratic drift of public management, which is very problematic given the tendency to use data analytics and/or algorithms for a top-down profiling of members of the public.
. Focusing on publics can help to weave the potential of the concepts of‘public value’ and ‘public values’ and to put them more into practice ‘to stimulate
debate between competing interests and perspectives, and to generate dialogue about how to improve public services, about who gains and who loses, and about relative benefits and cost’ (Benington,2009, p. 240).
We conclude with a powerful statement by Skelcher, which was made in 2007, but is still pertinent:
The next big step in public management research is to move beyond the question of whether management matters to answer the question: does democracy matter? (Skelcher,2007, p. 61.)
Covid-19 is exactly the example of how (public) management matters, but democracy does too. In this respect, public managers and politicians, and more broadly all civic leaders, can have a strategic role in nurturing and designing the conditions for publics to emerge from the bottom up and spontaneously around ‘matters of concern’, which is the real promise of democracy (Dewey,1927).
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
ORCID
Alessandro Sancino http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1892-9622
Mariafrancesca Sicilia http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9186-5496
Alessandro Braga http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8499-5487
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