Social Values within the Decision-Making Process of Public City Management

Abstract

This project aims to identify how to improve the inclusion of social values within the decision-making process of the city management department of the municipality of Rotterdam. The project was conducted in collaboration with the municipality and, specifically, their value wheel development team. The "value wheel" is a value-based decision-making tool, which aims for projects to be selected based on total value contributions instead of financial risks. The idea behind this model is that all values are considered on an equal basis within the decision-making process of asset management. The issue, however, is that the development team is still unable to quantify social impact, which makes that the value wheel model cannot consider social values at an equal rate as the other values of the value wheel.

Although the model is already being put into practice, social values still find no place within the decision-making process. The Rotterdam municipality currently does not have another established method to address social values, which makes that within the organisation, social values are often overlooked or misinterpreted. The literature indicates that various social impact measurement models exist. However, they all require a list of social value indicators designed for the context in which the models operate. This means for them to be used within the value wheel framework, social value considerations and indicators are required. Through participatory observations and interviews, officials of the municipality were asked to identify the social values present within the municipality. To include the value considerations of citizens, a text-mining model, which is trained to identify values, was applied to the complaint database of the municipality.

Next to the identification of social values did the project also explore possible barriers to the inclusion of a value-based framework within the municipality. Which is why the participatory sessions and the interviews were also used to identify the context in which the value wheel is intended to be implemented. To identify the issues of the value wheel framework itself, the sessions of the value development team were followed closely and a pilot case of the value wheel was attended.

Coding was applied on the collected dataset due to the various types of data collected. This resulted in the identification of eight main themes influencing the inclusion of social values within the decision-making process. These themes are: social values experienced by officials, social values experienced by the public, the value wheel, civil participation, trust, compartmentalisation, leadership within the municipality and standardisation. The thematic analyses of these themes indicate that there are both theoretical restrictions and practical issues that prevent the implementation of social values.

Moreover, by placing quantified social values within a model, officials are confronted with technical quantities instead of public desires. This causes the actual value considerations to get lost within the decision-making process. Issues with trust, participation, leadership, and compartmentalisation show that officials are already faced with a growing gap between the reality on the streets and the situation as officials perceive it in the office. Quantifying social values within a model only strengthens this gap, instead of ensuring that actual social value considerations are included.

The results of this project can help municipalities, but also other governmental bodies, to identify the restrictions that currently prevent social value considerations from being included in the decision-making process. With that information, steps can be taken to improve the inclusion and consideration of social values when new projects are developed.