Rethinking Roles and Responsibilities in the Context of the Public Private Value Shift From a Client Perspective

In today’s construction industry we witness an increase in public private collaboration in the delivery of public goods. New public private structures affect the traditional notion of accountability, bringing along a strong emphasis on performance and outcome. By transferring operational responsibility to the market parties in public private collaboration, there are fewer possibilities to directly influence the outcomes of these processes. Socio-political responsibilities, however, remain with public parties, requiring other kinds of safeguarding mechanisms to come into play. In this paper we aim to explore how public construction clients try to find a balance in public value management activities by rethinking their roles and responsibilities in the context of an increasing value and volume of integrated service deliveries in construction. We present results of a set of semi-structured interviews with different actors playing a part in commissioning of organisations with different degrees of publicness. The results indicate that the alignment of the client role and change in responsibilities should be rather flexible in order to balance the potentially conflicting procedural obligations as a public organisation and creating room to steer on increasingly important values of sustainability, innovation and quality. It was shown that public agents need to adopt a more facilitating and frame-setting role and build sustainable relationships based on trust. And although they are dependent of private market parties to achieve certain new‘ values, their position as public client organisations actually enables them to take a forerunners‘ role. In order to facilitate the desired value shift roles and responsibilities need to be aligned with steering mechanisms. Further research could look more closely into the alignment of the role and responsibility change and organisational- and steering mechanisms that are flexible enough to deal with the restrictions that lawfulness brings along.