Authorizing Environments

Operationally, for both practitioners and scholars, determining who and what the “public” is can be problematic. Nonetheless, Meynhardt) sees the “public” is an “indis pensable operational fiction necessary for action and orientation in a complex environment.” In other words, as complexity increases the more “the public” becomes a social construct “necessary for acting, but hard to pin down”. In practical terms, the public may already be known, may need to make itself known, or may need to be created. For example, Moore’s normative approach requires public managers to look to their “authorizing environments” for direction, although they may conclude that the public can be best served by working to change aspects of the authorizing environment. Moore also asserts that elected officials and the citizens (often via elections) are the arbiters of public value even when political decision making is deeply problematic on moral grounds. In democratic societies, citizens and managers can challenge these questionable decisions, but not ignore them. For Dewey, a public is “created” when citizens experience the negative consequences of situations beyond their control (resulting, for example, from market or governmental activities). In other circumstances, public administrators may need to “call a public into being” (Moore 2014a), for example, when designing and managing a public participation process