Public commissioning in a new era

Abstract

In the construction industry public and semi-public clients increasingly depend on private parties to achieve project outcomes by subcontracting part of their activities using integrated contracts. Due to their social-political responsibilities, public bodies retain having a special role in ensuring public values. Classifying which public values to pursue, at what moment, in which situation or by what type of service delivery is a core task of construction clients and gets reflected in governance and project mechanisms. In this paper we aim to systematically explore public value interests of public construction clients in their relation to the contractor. This paper presents preliminary results of a set of semi-structured interviews with different actors playing a part in commissioning of organisations with different degrees of publicness. Results show that procedural values related to the public character still get much attention. However, today's more collaborative process of delivering public services seems to have led to a shift in focus towards the product related values of innovation, sustainability and quality. Future research will examine governance mechanisms and frameworks to deal with identified experienced sector-specific conflicts.