Public Value Management: A Three-Dimensional Performance Assessment Spectrum for Public Security Organs

The performance assessment adopted by China’s public security organs has played a prominent part in various aspects ever since its implementation, e.g., boosting the efficiency of police work and the quality of public services, reducing administrative costs, improving the civilian-police relationship, etc. Going into the governance stage, however, long-overlooked problems started exposing themselves to some extent. One of the most apparent is the ratio-centered representation of assessment indicators, which has proved to be not particularly effective and accurate for systematically quantifying “governance.” Looking at the bigger picture, this performance assessment issue seems related to a multi-dimensional spectrum in a network environment. Contrary to the inability of the endless arrays of new public management approaches to satisfy network governance requirements, public value management seems to be the most fitting solution. This is due to its nature as an explanatory framework, which makes it compatible with investigating the status quo of the performance assessment on public security organs and the orientation of its development on the spectrum. In light of this, the study considered both the reality as well as the perspectives offered by the Public Value Management Theory, before reflecting on the dimensions of “value orientation,” “partnership,” and “networking behaviors” used in existing performance assessments by public security organs. Based on this reflection, a new set of dimensions for the performance assessment spectrum targeting public security organs was proposed: “public value,” “partners” and “networking competence.”