Public value: to each their own?

This paper studies the role of elected representatives in inter-organizational processes aimed at measuring public value. Specifically, it aims to offer a better understanding of the way collaboration between public managers, elected representatives, civil society and scientists can be derailed by the extraneous constraints borne by elected representatives. We explore the relationship between public value accounting, the authorizing environment and the role of the public manager (Moore, 2013) and question the democratic and managerial implications of the ability of elected representatives, as ostensible spokespeople for the authorizing environment, to unilaterally interrupt projects aimed at collaboratively define, measure, and assess public value creation. To do so, we mobilize Actor-Network Theory (Akrich, Callon & Latour, 2006) to describe specific human actors – elected representatives – engaging in a specific behavior: dissidence, by comparing two cases of "public value assessment failure" (Dreveton & Rocher, 2010, 2014; Féral, 2022). Factors such as different time scales and perspectives on public value and its assessment are shown to be important to understand such situations.