Re-organizing for public value in the anthropocene

This paper reconceptualises public value for the era of the Anthropocene and suggests that the best site for organizing for the creation of public value is the City. Existing understandings of public value are human-centric and only consider economic values. If public value is to be fit for the world of the Anthropocene and the climate crisis, local ecologies and other non-human actors need to be included as beneficiaries of public value creation. Including these new, non-human, actors facilitates a new understanding of what is value to focus on sustainability and resilience in the local natural ecosystem. The paper argues that City leadership and governance are best placed to both understand the needs of the local ecology and to produce the networks to create value for it.