Public commissioning in a new era: Public value interests of construction clients

In the project-based construction industry public and semi-public clients increasingly withdraw from direct delivery of public services and programmes. They increasingly depend on private parties to achieve public values and project outcomes by subcontracting at least part of their responsibilities in respect to the built environment using integrated contract forms. Due to their social-political responsibilities, public bodies retain having a special role in ensuring public values, only operational responsibility for creating public values gets transferred to the private market party. Classifying which public values to pursue, at what moment, in which situation or by what type of service delivery is a core professional task of construction clients and gets reflected in governance and project mechanisms. Today's project leaders need new skills and conceptual frameworks to cope with emerging disputes, conflicting interests, evolving requirements, and changes in the external environment. In this paper we aim to systematically explore the embedding of public values in public and semi-public commissioning organisations, and identify the value conflicts experienced by construction clients at strategic and tactic decision making levels. As data collection is still ongoing, the paper will, next to a theoretical framework, present the preliminary results of both a document analysis, of publicly available organisational documents and communication channels, and a set of 20-30 semi-structured interviews, using an interview protocol with open-ended questions. The interviews will be audio taped, transcribed verbatim to ensure reliability and analysed in Atlas.ti. For both studies the members of  'het Opdrachtgeversforum in de Bouw' (the Dutch Construction Client Forum) - a group of public and semi-public clients that work in the built environment positioned differently on the public-private continuum – will be the units of analysis. Further research will look at governance mechanisms and frameworks to deal with the identified experienced sector-specific conflicts.