Public value and procedural policy instrument specifications in 'design for service'

Strokosch and Osborne and others have recently argued the essence of effective service delivery in and by government increasingly involves the re-orientation of top-down service delivery toward enhanced co-design and co-creation. This new emphasis on what Strokosch and Osborne term designing and managing “for” services is seen to be increasingly replacing or augmenting an older emphasis on these tasks in the design “of” services. Analyzing and managing service design and delivery in this way, however, requires a steady eye to be maintained on the different ways in which “public value” is generated through each service process and upon the different kinds of policy tools useful in each activity. This paper expands and develops this thinking and the research and practice agenda around this emergent “designing for service” paradigm. It does so by focusing on the nature and types of substantive and procedural policy tools used in these efforts and especially upon a shift in emphasis toward the better understanding of the micro-level specifications of the procedural instruments used in management and design “for” services.