Public Management Reform and Public Value: The Case of the Elderly Care Reform in Denmark

A common public management reform model in the literature typically follows a process-based model. The problem is that this model often assumes that implementation and results have to occur before anything meaningful can be said about a reform from a research perspective. But politicians are active in making reforms and enter compromises when a reform is designed. A related literature in public management on creating public value and strategic public management has been developed by Mark Moore and focuses on actions by public managers. Inspiration from this literature is transferred to the public management reform literature to present a model of a strategic reform triangle that focuses on design of reforms and how reformers in government seek legitimacy, construct political narratives, and put forward public value propositions. This way, the active reform design process that governments engage in can be visible, and it can be demonstrated how and why reformers care about design, but not implementation. The strategic reform triangle model is employed in the paper to analyze a current administrative reform in Denmark, the Elderly Care Reform. The analysis shows how government reformers grapple with conflicting governance paradigms, how they construct a political narrative more about the economic conditions of having more elderly people in 2070 than elderly care in the immediate future, and how the public value propositions they put forward are more tuned towards future economics and future elderly people than the elderly population here and now.