Glossary

A–Z definitions of key terms used across the Public Value Guide. Each entry points to the topic where the term is defined and explained in full — this glossary gives a working definition, not the complete treatment.

Format: **Term** — plain-English definition. *[Wikipedia](url)* (where a verified article exists) — See Topic N.N — Title.

Populated as topics are written (see tasks.md). Sections are kept even when empty, as placeholders for terms not yet registered.

A

Ability–benevolence–integrity framework — A model of institutional trustworthiness judging whether an institution has the competence to do what it says, is perceived to care about citizens' interests, and is honest and consistent in applying its principles. — See Topic 4.2 — Trust in Government and Civic Engagement.

Accountability — The obligation to explain and justify conduct to someone with standing to ask, and, where the answer falls short, to face consequences; requires answerability, enforcement, and a clear line of who owes an account to whom. — See Topic 3.4 — Accountability, Transparency, and Legitimacy.

Algorithmic bias — The systematic, repeatable tendency of a computerized system to produce unfair outcomes, most often because it learns and reproduces patterns of historical over-policing, under-service, or discrimination present in its training data. — See Topic 5.2 — AI and Algorithmic Decision-Making in Government.

All-hazards approach — Planning, command structures, and core capabilities built to work across many hazard types, with hazard-specific detail layered on top, rather than a separate siloed plan for each hazard. — See Topic 3.12 — Crisis, Emergency, and Resilience Management.

Assisted digital — The deliberate provision of human help — by phone, in person, or through a trusted intermediary — for people experiencing digital exclusion, designed as a first-class part of a service rather than a residual fallback. — See Topic 5.1 — Digital Government and Digital Transformation.

Attribution — In social return on investment, the share of an outcome properly credited to other actors rather than to this organization alone, one of four adjustments used to avoid overclaiming impact. — See Topic 2.3 — Social Return on Investment and Impact Measurement.

Authorizing environment — The people and institutions whose formal or informal consent an organization needs in order to act, and whose withdrawal of consent can stop it acting; also called legitimacy and support. — See Topic 1.2 — The Strategic Triangle: Legitimacy, Value, and Capacity.

Automated decision-making — The use of data, software, and algorithms to make or materially inform decisions with varying degrees of human oversight, spanning a spectrum from decision support to full automation with no human involved at all. — See Topic 5.2 — AI and Algorithmic Decision-Making in Government.

B

Behavioural insights unit — A specialist team, often called a 'nudge unit', embedded in or advising a government, that applies behavioural science methods, frequently including small-scale randomized trials, to redesign interventions and test whether they work before scaling. — See Topic 4.1 — Behavioural Public Policy.

Bid rigging — Collusion among bidders, or a buyer favouring a chosen supplier, that defeats the purpose of a competitive tender; the recurring failure procurement integrity safeguards exist to prevent. — See Topic 3.7 — Public Procurement and Commissioning.

Black box — A model or system whose internal workings cannot be inspected or understood from its inputs and outputs alone, true of many high-performing machine-learning models whose accuracy often comes from the same complexity that makes them hard to interpret. — See Topic 5.2 — AI and Algorithmic Decision-Making in Government.

Build-versus-buy decision — The choice between commissioning bespoke software written for one organization's need and adopting configurable commodity software already built for a market of similar buyers. — See Topic 5.3 — Public Sector Software Engineering and Platforms.

Business case — The document setting out the reasoning for a proposed public spend — the problem it solves, the options considered, and the costs and benefits — so a decision-maker can approve, reject, or send it back. — See Topic 2.5 — Business Cases and Value for Money.

Business continuity planning — The organizational discipline of keeping an organization's own critical functions running, or restoring them quickly, when disrupted by an incident, whether or not it is a public emergency. — See Topic 3.12 — Crisis, Emergency, and Resilience Management.

C

Capability approach — Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum's framework asking whether people have the real freedom to do and be the things they value, distinguishing a functioning (a state actually achieved) from a capability (the genuine opportunity to achieve it). — See Topic 3.5 — Equity, Fairness, and Distributive Justice.

Career-based system — A civil service model that recruits mainly at entry level and expects most employees to spend a working lifetime rising through a defined internal hierarchy. — See Topic 3.6 — Public Sector Workforce and Labour Markets.

Cascading crisis — A failure in which one hazard triggers or masks another, propagating through interdependent systems faster than anyone can intervene; also called a compound crisis. — See Topic 3.12 — Crisis, Emergency, and Resilience Management.

Causal inference — The branch of statistics concerned with establishing whether, and by how much, one variable's change produces a change in another, as distinct from the two merely moving together. — See Topic 2.4 — Public Sector Econometrics and Programme Evaluation.

Choice architecture — The deliberate design of the environment in which a decision is made, including defaults, framing, and social proof, which predictably influences the choice a person makes. — See Topic 4.1 — Behavioural Public Policy.

Citizens' assembly — A body of people selected by lottery to be broadly representative of the population, given time, balanced evidence, and expert input to deliberate on a specific question and produce recommendations. — See Topic 1.5 — Stakeholders, Citizens, and Co-Production.

Civic engagement — Individual and collective activity, inside or outside formal politics, addressing issues of public concern, spanning voting, volunteering, community organizing, and deliberative participation. — See Topic 4.2 — Trust in Government and Civic Engagement.

Climate change adaptation — The process of adjusting infrastructure, institutions, behaviour, and natural systems to the effects of climate change already occurring or anticipated. — See Topic 4.3 — Climate, Sustainability, and Environmental Public Value.

Climate change mitigation — Action to limit the greenhouse gases entering the atmosphere, whether by cutting emissions at source or increasing removals; economically a textbook global public good. — See Topic 4.3 — Climate, Sustainability, and Environmental Public Value.

Club good — A good that is excludable but non-rivalrous up to a capacity limit, such as a members' pool or an off-peak toll road; it becomes rivalrous once congestion sets in. — See Topic 1.4 — Public Goods, Merit Goods, and Value Pluralism.

Co-design — The direct involvement of citizens and service users as active partners in designing a public service, rather than only as subjects consulted about a design produced by others. — See Topic 1.5 — Stakeholders, Citizens, and Co-Production.

Co-production — The involvement of citizens and service users directly in the design and delivery of public services, contributing effort, information, compliance, or behaviour change as a direct input to the outcome. — See Topic 1.5 — Stakeholders, Citizens, and Co-Production.

Command-and-control regulation — Regulation that sets uniform, prescriptive rules and penalizes any breach regardless of the breaching firm's track record or actual risk posed. — See Topic 3.10 — Regulation and Public Risk Management.

Common-pool resource — A good that is rivalrous but costly to exclude anyone from, such as a fishery or an aquifer, making it prone to a tragedy of the commons without deliberate governance. — See Topic 1.4 — Public Goods, Merit Goods, and Value Pluralism.

Cooperative federalism — The pattern, sometimes called 'marble-cake' federalism, in which national and subnational governments jointly design and fund programmes, blending their responsibilities rather than each occupying a strictly separate domain. — See Topic 3.9 — Intergovernmental Relations and Federalism.

Cost-benefit analysis — A method that converts every material cost and benefit of a proposed action into a common monetary unit, discounts each to a common point in time, and compares the present values to judge whether a programme creates more value than it consumes. — See Topic 2.2 — Social Cost-Benefit and Cost-Effectiveness Analysis.

Cost-effectiveness analysis — A method that compares programmes using a single non-monetized outcome measure, such as cost per case prevented or per quality-adjusted life year, rather than converting every benefit into money. — See Topic 2.2 — Social Cost-Benefit and Cost-Effectiveness Analysis.

Counterfactual — The outcome a person or unit would have experienced had they not received a programme; the central, unobservable quantity every causal-evaluation method tries to approximate. — See Topic 2.4 — Public Sector Econometrics and Programme Evaluation.

Crisis communication — The practice of communicating quickly, honestly, and consistently while an emergency is still unfolding and facts are still incomplete. — See Topic 4.4 — Social Media, Misinformation, and Public Communication.

Critical infrastructure — The set of systems and assets — energy, water, transport, healthcare, finance, communications — so essential that their incapacity or destruction would have a debilitating effect on safety, the economy, or public confidence. — See Topic 5.5 — Cybersecurity and Public Sector Technology Risk.

Cyber hygiene — The set of routine practices — patching software promptly, enforcing strong authentication, limiting access, backing up data and testing restoration — that prevent the large majority of successful cyberattacks without requiring exotic tools. — See Topic 5.5 — Cybersecurity and Public Sector Technology Risk.

D

Data breach — The unauthorized access, disclosure, or loss of information, whether through an external attack, an insider, or simple human error such as a misconfigured database left open to the internet. — See Topic 5.5 — Cybersecurity and Public Sector Technology Risk.

Data governance — The set of decision rights, standards, and accountabilities that determine who may create, change, access, and retire an organization's data, and to what standard of quality it must be held. — See Topic 5.4 — Public Sector Data, Interoperability, and Open Data.

Data-sharing agreement — A formal arrangement between agencies, or between a public body and an external partner, specifying the purpose data may be used for, the legal basis for sharing it, how long it may be retained, and what happens if the purpose changes. — See Topic 5.4 — Public Sector Data, Interoperability, and Open Data.

Deadweight — The proportion of an outcome that would have happened without the intervention at all, one of the deductions used in social return on investment to avoid overclaiming impact. — See Topic 2.3 — Social Return on Investment and Impact Measurement.

Default option — The option a person receives automatically if they take no action; strikingly persistent in practice because inertia and the effort of active choice make people unlikely to opt out even when doing so costs almost nothing. — See Topic 4.1 — Behavioural Public Policy.

Deficit spending — Government expenditure that exceeds revenue in a period; one fiscal lever among others, with genuine debate over when and how much of it is appropriate rather than whether it is always wrong. — See Topic 3.3 — Public Finance and Budgeting.

Deliberative democracy — Decision processes in which reasoned discussion among participants, rather than the simple aggregation of pre-formed preferences through voting, is the source of legitimacy. — See Topic 1.5 — Stakeholders, Citizens, and Co-Production.

Demerit good — A good, such as tobacco or unregulated gambling, that society judges people should consume less of than their own preferences alone would produce. — See Topic 1.4 — Public Goods, Merit Goods, and Value Pluralism.

Design thinking — The set of methods — problem reframing, user research, rapid prototyping, iterative testing — most public-sector innovation labs use as their working method, adapted from commercial product design. — See Topic 5.6 — Innovation and Public Entrepreneurship.

Devolution — The statutory transfer of specified powers from a central government to a subnational level, without the constituent unit acquiring the entrenched, constitutionally protected status a federal region holds. — See Topic 3.9 — Intergovernmental Relations and Federalism.

Difference principle — Rawls's principle that social and economic inequalities are justified only where they work to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged, not merely to the average. — See Topic 3.5 — Equity, Fairness, and Distributive Justice.

Difference-in-differences — An evaluation method that compares the change in outcomes over time for a treated group against the change for a comparison group that did not receive the programme, assuming the two would otherwise have followed parallel trends. — See Topic 2.4 — Public Sector Econometrics and Programme Evaluation.

Differential privacy — A mathematically rigorous approach that adds carefully calibrated statistical noise to a dataset or to query results, so the presence or absence of any single individual's record changes the published output by only a bounded, provable amount. — See Topic 5.4 — Public Sector Data, Interoperability, and Open Data.

Diffusion of innovations — Everett Rogers's theory explaining how, why, and at what rate a new idea or practice spreads through a social system, sorting adopters into innovators, early adopters, an early majority, a late majority, and laggards. — See Topic 5.6 — Innovation and Public Entrepreneurship.

Digital exclusion — The condition of being unable, for reasons of access, skill, confidence, disability, language, or circumstance, to complete a transaction through a digital channel, even where one is offered. — See Topic 5.1 — Digital Government and Digital Transformation.

Digital government — The use of information technology to deliver public services and conduct transactions between government, citizens, businesses, and government's own employees that used to require a paper form, a counter visit, or a phone call; also called e-government. — See Topic 5.1 — Digital Government and Digital Transformation.

Digital identity — A verified, reusable way of establishing that an online user is who they claim to be, built once so multiple services do not each solve identity verification independently. — See Topic 5.1 — Digital Government and Digital Transformation.

Digital public good — Open software, data, or content, released under an open licence, designed to help meet a public development or governance objective rather than generate a commercial return. — See Topic 5.3 — Public Sector Software Engineering and Platforms.

Digital service standards — Codified sets of principles, usually paired with an independent assessment gate before a service can launch or scale, that hold delivery teams to a common bar of starting with user needs, testing with real users, and building iteratively. — See Topic 5.1 — Digital Government and Digital Transformation.

Digital-era governance — The paradigm, identified as New Public Management's successor, of reintegrating fragmented, contracted-out government functions and redesigning services around citizens' actual needs using digital technology. — See Topic 3.1 — Public Administration Systems and Models.

Digital-first — A delivery strategy under which the digital channel is built to be the best, and usually the only actively promoted, way to complete a transaction, with other channels retained for people who cannot use it; also called digital-by-default. — See Topic 5.1 — Digital Government and Digital Transformation.

Disinformation — False or misleading information deliberately created or spread to deceive, for political, financial, or strategic gain, distinguished from misinformation by intent rather than content. — See Topic 4.4 — Social Media, Misinformation, and Public Communication.

Displacement — The extent to which a positive outcome for one group came at the expense of a negative outcome for another, such as a job created that simply moved from a neighbouring town. — See Topic 2.3 — Social Return on Investment and Impact Measurement.

Distributional weighting — An adjustment to cost-benefit analysis that reflects a pound or dollar being worth more, in welfare terms, to a poor household than a rich one. — See Topic 2.2 — Social Cost-Benefit and Cost-Effectiveness Analysis.

Distributive justice — The branch of political philosophy concerned with how a society ought to allocate benefits and burdens — income, services, opportunities, risks — among its members. — See Topic 3.5 — Equity, Fairness, and Distributive Justice.

Double bottom line — Organizational performance judged on social impact alongside financial return, rather than folding the two into a single number. — See Topic 3.8 — Social Sector and Nonprofit Management.

Drop-off — The decay of an outcome's value over the years following an intervention, since a benefit rarely persists at full strength indefinitely. — See Topic 2.3 — Social Return on Investment and Impact Measurement.

E

EAST framework — A practitioner framework compressing behavioural design advice into four words: make a desired behaviour Easy, Attractive, Social, and Timely. — See Topic 4.1 — Behavioural Public Policy.

Echo chamber — An environment in which a person mainly encounters information that confirms views they already hold, typically through the people they choose to follow. — See Topic 4.4 — Social Media, Misinformation, and Public Communication.

Ecosystem services — Benefits humans derive from ecosystems, from provisioning services such as timber and fisheries, through regulating services such as flood control and carbon storage, to cultural services such as recreation. — See Topic 4.3 — Climate, Sustainability, and Environmental Public Value.

Emergency management — The discipline of reducing vulnerability to hazards and coordinating the response when they occur, organized around prevention and mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery. — See Topic 3.12 — Crisis, Emergency, and Resilience Management.

Equalization payments — Cash transfers from a central government to subnational governments, calculated to offset differences in their own revenue-raising capacity or cost of providing a comparable service level. — See Topic 3.9 — Intergovernmental Relations and Federalism.

Escape clause — Stated conditions, such as a recession or declared emergency, under which a fiscal rule is formally suspended rather than quietly ignored, preserving flexibility without destroying credibility for the next shock. — See Topic 3.3 — Public Finance and Budgeting.

Evidence-based policy — The movement and normative claim that public decisions should be grounded in rigorously established evidence rather than ideology, anecdote, or intuition alone. — See Topic 2.6 — Evidence Synthesis and What Works.

Evidence of absence — A well-powered body of studies that positively found no effect, distinct from mere absence of evidence (a lack of studies on the question at all); conflating the two is a common and consequential policy error. — See Topic 2.6 — Evidence Synthesis and What Works.

Explainable artificial intelligence — The field of methods for making a model's reasoning inspectable, ranging from choosing inherently interpretable model types to generating post-hoc explanations that approximate what a complex model actually did. — See Topic 5.2 — AI and Algorithmic Decision-Making in Government.

Externality — A cost or benefit of an activity that falls on people not party to the transaction causing it, leading markets to over-produce activities with negative externalities and under-produce those with positive ones. — See Topic 1.3 — Market Failure and Government Failure.

F

Fairness in machine learning — The family of technical and procedural approaches for measuring and correcting algorithmic bias, complicated by the fact that several intuitively reasonable definitions of fairness are mathematically incompatible whenever groups have different base rates in the data. — See Topic 5.2 — AI and Algorithmic Decision-Making in Government.

Federalism — A system of government in which power is constitutionally divided between a national government and constituent regional governments, such that neither level can unilaterally abolish the other's authority. — See Topic 3.9 — Intergovernmental Relations and Federalism.

Fiduciary — A person who holds a position of trust and is legally required to act in an organization's interests rather than their own, typically owing duties of care, loyalty, and obedience. — See Topic 3.8 — Social Sector and Nonprofit Management.

Filter bubble — The narrowing of what a person sees online caused by a platform's own recommendation algorithm, distinct from an echo chamber in that the person did not choose it. — See Topic 4.4 — Social Media, Misinformation, and Public Communication.

Financial endowment — A pool of invested capital managed to preserve its principal while distributing a portion of its returns each year, giving a foundation a funding horizon measured in decades. — See Topic 3.8 — Social Sector and Nonprofit Management.

Financial proxy — A monetary stand-in for an outcome with no market price of its own, used in social return on investment; an argued, disclosable choice rather than an observed market price. — See Topic 2.3 — Social Return on Investment and Impact Measurement.

Fiscal federalism — The subfield of public economics concerned with which government functions and revenue instruments should be centralized and which devolved, and how money should move between levels. — See Topic 3.9 — Intergovernmental Relations and Federalism.

Fiscal rule — A numerical constraint on budgetary aggregates, set in law, constitution, or binding policy, intended to prevent a persistent deficit bias in government spending. — See Topic 3.3 — Public Finance and Budgeting.

Five case model — The dominant public-sector business-case pattern, requiring five distinct cases — strategic, economic, commercial, financial, and management — because a proposal can fail on any one even while succeeding on the others. — See Topic 2.5 — Business Cases and Value for Money.

Free-rider problem — The rational individual strategy of letting others pay for a non-excludable good while consuming it anyway, which causes public goods to be under-produced if left to voluntary provision alone. — See Topic 1.4 — Public Goods, Merit Goods, and Value Pluralism.

Freedom of information — The principle, and increasingly the statutory right, that the public may request and receive documents and records held by government bodies, subject to defined and narrow exceptions. — See Topic 3.4 — Accountability, Transparency, and Legitimacy.

G

Garbage can model — A model of organizational decision-making in which problems, solutions, participants, and choice opportunities flow largely independently, with a decision occurring when a choice opportunity happens to bring the other three together. — See Topic 3.2 — Public Policy and the Policy Cycle.

Goodhart's law — The principle that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure, because people change their behaviour in response to the target itself. — See Topic 3.11 — Quality, Safety, and Performance Management.

Government as a platform — The pattern of building a small number of shared, reusable pieces of infrastructure — such as identity verification, payments, notifications, and document exchange — once, to a high standard, so many individual services can be built on top of them. — See Topic 5.1 — Digital Government and Digital Transformation.

Government failure — Intervention meant to correct a market failure that instead leaves resources worse allocated than the flawed market it replaced. — See Topic 1.3 — Market Failure and Government Failure.

GRADE approach — A framework that rates both the certainty of evidence and, independently, the strength of a recommendation to act on it, so strong evidence does not always mean a strong recommendation and weak evidence does not always mean inaction. — See Topic 2.6 — Evidence Synthesis and What Works.

Grant — A sum of money given for a specified purpose that does not need to be repaid, typically carrying conditions on how and when it can be spent, distinct from a contract's reciprocal exchange of a specified deliverable at an agreed price. — See Topic 3.7 — Public Procurement and Commissioning.

H

Hierarchy of evidence — A ranking of study designs by how well they control for confounding and bias, typically placing meta-analyses of randomized trials at the top and expert opinion at the bottom; a useful heuristic, not an absolute law. — See Topic 2.6 — Evidence Synthesis and What Works.

Horizontal accountability — Accountability that runs between state bodies of roughly equal formal standing — courts, auditors, ombudsmen, legislative committees — rather than between citizens and power-holders directly. — See Topic 3.4 — Accountability, Transparency, and Legitimacy.

Horizontal equity — Treating people who are alike in the relevant respect alike, such as two patients with identical clinical need receiving identical treatment. — See Topic 3.5 — Equity, Fairness, and Distributive Justice.

Human-in-the-loop — An arrangement in which a person reviews or approves an algorithm's output before it takes effect, distinct from a person merely monitoring with power to intervene, or fully automated processing with no review at all. — See Topic 5.2 — AI and Algorithmic Decision-Making in Government.

I

Incident Command System — A standardized model for organizing crisis response into strategic, tactical, and operational decision tiers with clear escalation triggers between them. — See Topic 3.12 — Crisis, Emergency, and Resilience Management.

Incremental budgeting — A budgeting approach that takes the prior year's allocation as the starting point and negotiates only the size of the change, rather than re-justifying the full base each cycle. — See Topic 3.3 — Public Finance and Budgeting.

Incrementalism — The theory, developed by Charles Lindblom, that real policymakers rarely conduct comprehensive analysis of every option, making small, successive, more easily reversible adjustments to existing policy instead. — See Topic 3.2 — Public Policy and the Policy Cycle.

Infodemic — An excessive volume of information, both accurate and inaccurate, that makes it hard for people to find trustworthy guidance when they need it. — See Topic 4.4 — Social Media, Misinformation, and Public Communication.

Information asymmetry — A situation where one party to a transaction knows materially more than the other, which can trigger adverse selection or moral hazard and shrink or collapse a market. — See Topic 1.3 — Market Failure and Government Failure.

Institutional isomorphism — The tendency for organizations exposed to similar funder expectations, reporting templates, and evaluation methods to come to resemble one another over time. — See Topic 3.8 — Social Sector and Nonprofit Management.

Institutional trust — A citizen's willingness to be vulnerable to an institution's actions based on the expectation that it will perform as expected, without needing to monitor or control it directly. — See Topic 4.2 — Trust in Government and Civic Engagement.

Instrumental variables estimation — A method that uses a third variable affecting programme take-up but with no direct effect on the outcome except through that take-up, to strip confounding out of an estimated effect. — See Topic 2.4 — Public Sector Econometrics and Programme Evaluation.

Intergenerational equity — The principle of fairness between generations, central to how a social discount rate should weigh a cost today against a benefit decades away. — See Topic 4.3 — Climate, Sustainability, and Environmental Public Value.

Interoperability — The capacity of independently built systems to exchange data and use it correctly without special-case, one-off engineering for every pair of systems involved, spanning technical, semantic, and organizational levels. — See Topic 5.4 — Public Sector Data, Interoperability, and Open Data.

Intrapreneurship — Entrepreneurial behaviour by an individual working inside an existing large organization rather than founding a new one; the closest private-sector cousin to public entrepreneurship. — See Topic 5.6 — Innovation and Public Entrepreneurship.

IRIS+ — A shared catalogue of impact metrics maintained by the Global Impact Investing Network, letting investors and investees choose from common indicators instead of monetizing every outcome into a bespoke ratio. — See Topic 2.3 — Social Return on Investment and Impact Measurement.

J

K

K-anonymity — A formal privacy criterion satisfied when every combination of quasi-identifying fields in a dataset is shared by at least a defined number, k, of records, so no single row can be isolated to fewer than k possible people. — See Topic 5.4 — Public Sector Data, Interoperability, and Open Data.

Kaldor–Hicks efficiency — The criterion that an action is worth taking if those who gain could, in principle, fully compensate those who lose and still be better off, even if that compensation never actually happens. — See Topic 2.2 — Social Cost-Benefit and Cost-Effectiveness Analysis.

L

Legacy system — An old technology, application, or platform that remains in active use despite being outdated, often because replacing it is expensive or because nobody left in the organization fully understands what it does. — See Topic 5.3 — Public Sector Software Engineering and Platforms.

Legitimacy — The degree to which those subject to an authority accept its right to exercise power over them, resting on some mix of legal procedure, democratic consent, competence, and perceived fairness; distinct from mere legality. — See Topic 3.4 — Accountability, Transparency, and Legitimacy.

Libertarian paternalism — Thaler and Sunstein's name for the philosophy behind nudging: paternalist in deliberately steering people toward outcomes believed to serve their own interests, libertarian in preserving a genuine, low-cost option to choose otherwise. — See Topic 4.1 — Behavioural Public Policy.

Living lab — An open, user-centred innovation environment where researchers, businesses, government bodies, and citizens co-create and test solutions in real-world settings rather than in a controlled laboratory. — See Topic 5.6 — Innovation and Public Entrepreneurship.

Logic model — A diagram of the causal chain a programme claims to run: inputs, activities, outputs, outcomes, and impact. — See Topic 2.1 — The Public Value Scorecard and Outcomes Frameworks.

Loss and damage — Residual climate harm that occurs after mitigation has failed to prevent a change and adaptation has failed, or been unable, to absorb it. — See Topic 4.3 — Climate, Sustainability, and Environmental Public Value.

Loss aversion — The tendency for losing something to be felt roughly twice as painfully as gaining the equivalent amount is felt as pleasurable, which is why how a change is framed as a loss or a gain affects how strongly people resist it. — See Topic 4.1 — Behavioural Public Policy.

M

Market failure — Unregulated private exchange producing an outcome that is not efficient by the market's own standards, such as under-provision of public goods, externalities, or information asymmetry. — See Topic 1.3 — Market Failure and Government Failure.

Means test — An assessment of a person's income or assets used to determine eligibility for a targeted benefit; never free to administer, and prone to producing a take-up gap and a cliff edge at its threshold. — See Topic 3.5 — Equity, Fairness, and Distributive Justice.

Measure fixation — Treating success on a performance indicator as equivalent to success on the underlying objective, so the proxy displaces the goal in an organization's actual attention. — See Topic 3.11 — Quality, Safety, and Performance Management.

Medium-term expenditure framework — A rolling multi-year fiscal plan, typically three to five years, that links a single-year budget to its consequences in the years that follow, combining a top-down resource envelope with a bottom-up costing of commitments. — See Topic 3.3 — Public Finance and Budgeting.

Merit good — A good, such as education or vaccination, that society judges people should consume more of than their own willingness to pay would produce, on grounds of benefit rather than market demand. — See Topic 1.4 — Public Goods, Merit Goods, and Value Pluralism.

Merit system — The principle that recruitment and promotion in public employment should be decided on ability to do the job, assessed through open and fair competition, rather than political connection. — See Topic 3.6 — Public Sector Workforce and Labour Markets.

Meta-analysis — A statistical technique that pools the quantitative effect sizes from multiple independent studies into a single, more precise estimate. — See Topic 2.6 — Evidence Synthesis and What Works.

Misinformation — False or misleading information shared without an intent to deceive. — See Topic 4.4 — Social Media, Misinformation, and Public Communication.

Mission drift — A slow, often unnoticed reorientation of an organization's activity toward what is fundable rather than what its founding mission or beneficiaries actually need. — See Topic 3.8 — Social Sector and Nonprofit Management.

Monopsony — A market in which a single buyer accounts for most or all of the demand for a good or service, giving that buyer power to influence the price below what a competitive market would set. — See Topic 3.6 — Public Sector Workforce and Labour Markets.

Multiple streams framework — John Kingdon's account of agenda-setting, in which independent problem, policy, and politics streams are coupled together by a policy entrepreneur when a policy window opens. — See Topic 3.2 — Public Policy and the Policy Cycle.

N

Natural capital — The stock of the world's natural resources, treated by analogy with financial capital as an asset yielding a flow of value over time. — See Topic 4.3 — Climate, Sustainability, and Environmental Public Value.

Natural capital accounting — The attempt to measure natural capital's stocks and flows in terms that sit alongside financial and social accounts, so ecosystem services can inform decisions the way a financial asset's value already does. — See Topic 4.3 — Climate, Sustainability, and Environmental Public Value.

Net present value — The sum of all future benefits minus all future costs from a programme, each converted to today's money using a discount rate. — See Topic 2.2 — Social Cost-Benefit and Cost-Effectiveness Analysis.

New Public Governance — The paradigm that treats public value as produced through networks of interdependent actors — government, contracted providers, nonprofits, and citizens — coordinated through negotiated relationships rather than hierarchy or market competition. — See Topic 3.1 — Public Administration Systems and Models.

New Public Management — The reform wave, dominant from the early 1980s into the 2000s, that broke up large bureaucracies, introduced competition through contracting-out, and judged public organizations chiefly by the efficiency and economy of measurable outputs. — See Topic 3.1 — Public Administration Systems and Models.

Non-governmental organization — An organization, often working across borders on humanitarian, development, environmental, or advocacy issues, defined chiefly by its independence from the state. — See Topic 3.8 — Social Sector and Nonprofit Management.

Nonprofit organization — A legal entity that operates for a collective, public, or social purpose rather than for private profit, reinvesting any surplus in its mission rather than distributing it to owners. — See Topic 3.8 — Social Sector and Nonprofit Management.

Nudge theory — The idea that any aspect of how a choice is presented predictably influences the decision made, and that this choice architecture can be designed deliberately to help people choose what they would, on reflection, choose for themselves, without forbidding any option. — See Topic 4.1 — Behavioural Public Policy.

O

Ombudsman — An office that investigates individual complaints of maladministration and, cumulatively, surfaces systemic problems, typically relying on the reputational cost of a public finding rather than the power to compel a remedy. — See Topic 3.4 — Accountability, Transparency, and Legitimacy.

Open data — Data that is made freely available for anyone to access, use, and redistribute, for any purpose, typically machine-readable and released under a licence that permits reuse rather than merely viewing. — See Topic 5.4 — Public Sector Data, Interoperability, and Open Data.

Open-source-by-default — A policy under which a public body defaults to publishing the source code it commissions unless a specific reason justifies withholding it, on the principle that software paid for once with public funds should not need to be paid for again elsewhere. — See Topic 5.3 — Public Sector Software Engineering and Platforms.

Operational capacity — What an organization can actually produce with the people, money, technology, legal authority, partnerships, and time it has or can credibly obtain. — See Topic 1.2 — The Strategic Triangle: Legitimacy, Value, and Capacity.

Optimism bias — The well-evidenced, systematic tendency to underestimate costs, timescales, and risks and overestimate benefits in a proposal, corrected for with an evidence-based uplift. — See Topic 2.5 — Business Cases and Value for Money.

Outcomes-based commissioning — A strategic approach to deciding what to buy and how to pay for it, built around the outcome a service is meant to achieve rather than the activities assumed to produce it. — See Topic 3.7 — Public Procurement and Commissioning.

P

Participatory budgeting — A process that gives residents a direct, binding say over how part of a public budget is spent, typically through neighbourhood proposals followed by a public vote. — See Topic 1.5 — Stakeholders, Citizens, and Co-Production.

Payment by results — A payment model, also called performance-based contracting, that ties some or all of a provider's payment to verified outcomes rather than activity delivered. — See Topic 3.7 — Public Procurement and Commissioning.

Performance accountability — In results-based accountability, the question of how well a specific programme or agency is doing, split into effort, quality, and effect. — See Topic 2.1 — The Public Value Scorecard and Outcomes Frameworks.

Performance indicator — A measurable variable chosen to stand in for an aspect of performance that cannot itself be observed directly and continuously. — See Topic 3.11 — Quality, Safety, and Performance Management.

Performance-based budgeting — A budgeting approach that classifies spending by what it is meant to achieve, linking funding levels, at least notionally, to expected or achieved results rather than only a line-item chart of accounts. — See Topic 3.3 — Public Finance and Budgeting.

Perverse incentive — An incentive structure that produces results contrary to what its designers intended, because people optimize for the letter of the reward rather than the purpose behind it. — See Topic 3.11 — Quality, Safety, and Performance Management.

Phishing — A form of social engineering in which attackers deceive staff into revealing credentials or installing malware, typically through deceptive email, and the most common way an attacker first gains a foothold. — See Topic 5.5 — Cybersecurity and Public Sector Technology Risk.

Policy cycle — A stylized model of how public decisions are made, typically broken into agenda-setting, formulation, adoption, implementation, and evaluation stages, shown as a loop because evaluation routinely reopens the agenda. — See Topic 3.2 — Public Policy and the Policy Cycle.

Policy instrument — The specific tool used to translate an adopted policy into effect, typically grouped into regulation, spending, taxation, and information or persuasion. — See Topic 3.2 — Public Policy and the Policy Cycle.

Policy window — A moment, in John Kingdon's framework, when a problem, a ready solution, and political conditions align, letting a policy entrepreneur couple the three together and move an issue onto the agenda. — See Topic 3.2 — Public Policy and the Policy Cycle.

Population accountability — In results-based accountability, the question of how a whole community or jurisdiction is faring on a condition of well-being, using headline indicators no single agency fully controls. — See Topic 2.1 — The Public Value Scorecard and Outcomes Frameworks.

Position-based system — A civil service model that recruits separately for each vacant post, at any level, from inside or outside government, evaluating candidates against the specific job. — See Topic 3.6 — Public Sector Workforce and Labour Markets.

Prebunking — Exposing people to a weakened, pre-emptive version of a misleading argument or technique before they encounter the real thing, so they build resistance to it in advance. — See Topic 4.4 — Social Media, Misinformation, and Public Communication.

Precautionary principle — The principle that when an action carries a suspected risk of serious or irreversible harm, the absence of full scientific certainty should not be used as a reason to postpone protective measures. — See Topic 3.10 — Regulation and Public Risk Management.

Principal–agent problem — The gap that opens when one party (the agent) acts on behalf of another (the principal) but has different interests and better information, as when citizens delegate to politicians who delegate to bureaucrats. — See Topic 1.3 — Market Failure and Government Failure.

Procedural justice — The theory that people comply with rules substantially because they judge the process that produced and enforces those rules to be fair, resting on voice, neutrality, respect, and trustworthy motives. — See Topic 4.2 — Trust in Government and Civic Engagement.

Proportionality — The principle that a regulatory response should be no more restrictive than necessary to address the risk it targets; the main practical check on the precautionary principle. — See Topic 3.10 — Regulation and Public Risk Management.

Public choice theory — The branch of economics that applies the same self-interested, rational-actor assumption to voters, politicians, and bureaucrats that conventional economics applies to consumers and firms. — See Topic 1.3 — Market Failure and Government Failure.

Public entrepreneurship — The application of an entrepreneurial disposition — noticing an opportunity nobody else has claimed and capturing it — to the pursuit of public value, answerable to an authorizing environment rather than to customers and investors. — See Topic 5.6 — Innovation and Public Entrepreneurship.

Public good — A good that is both non-rivalrous and non-excludable, such as national defence or a lighthouse, which markets systematically under-supply because no one can practically be charged for it. — See Topic 1.4 — Public Goods, Merit Goods, and Value Pluralism.

Public procurement — The process by which a public body acquires goods, works, or services using public money, under rules designed to secure competition, non-discrimination, transparency, and value for money. — See Topic 3.7 — Public Procurement and Commissioning.

Public service motivation — The documented tendency of many people working in government and non-governmental organizations to be motivated, at least in part, by a desire to serve the public interest rather than by pay and career incentives alone. — See Topic 3.6 — Public Sector Workforce and Labour Markets.

Public value — What a public or social-sector organization contributes to society, judged by what citizens collectively would regard as worth the shared resources spent producing it; the public-sector counterpart to shareholder value. — See Topic 1.1 — Introduction to Public Value.

Public value proposition — The case that a given use of collective authority and resources is worth what it costs to citizens collectively, inferred from votes, willingness to pay, and observed behaviour rather than a market price. — See Topic 1.2 — The Strategic Triangle: Legitimacy, Value, and Capacity.

Public Value Scorecard — Mark Moore's tool for tracking each leg of the strategic triangle — legitimacy, value, and capacity — with its own set of indicators, adapted from the private-sector balanced scorecard. — See Topic 2.1 — The Public Value Scorecard and Outcomes Frameworks.

Public-sector innovation lab — A dedicated team, unit, or fund whose explicit purpose is to structure and embed innovation methods, such as service design and rapid testing, in pursuit of a public or social problem, usually with partial insulation from ordinary sign-off processes. — See Topic 5.6 — Innovation and Public Entrepreneurship.

Publication bias — The tendency for studies with positive, significant results to be published while null or negative results go unpublished, making an intervention look more consistently effective in the literature than it really is. — See Topic 2.6 — Evidence Synthesis and What Works.

Publicness — The idea that 'public' and 'private' are not fixed categories but a matter of degree, since even private organizations operate under public constraints and public bodies rely on market mechanisms. — See Topic 1.1 — Introduction to Public Value.

Q

Quality assurance — The systematic, organization-owned discipline of ensuring a product or service consistently meets a defined standard through defect prevention built into the process rather than inspection of the finished output alone. — See Topic 3.11 — Quality, Safety, and Performance Management.

R

Randomized controlled trial — An evaluation design that assigns eligible units at random to a treatment group and a control group, so the two differ, on average, only in whether they were treated. — See Topic 2.4 — Public Sector Econometrics and Programme Evaluation.

Ransomware — Malicious software that encrypts an organization's data or systems and demands payment for their release; the dominant cyber threat to public bodies because essential services cannot tolerate prolonged downtime. — See Topic 5.5 — Cybersecurity and Public Sector Technology Risk.

Re-identification — The process of matching supposedly anonymized data against other available information to work out which real person a record describes, often through a combination of quasi-identifiers rather than any single removed identifier. — See Topic 5.4 — Public Sector Data, Interoperability, and Open Data.

Regression discontinuity design — An evaluation method that exploits a programme rule assigning treatment based on a score crossing a fixed cut-off, comparing outcomes for units just above and just below. — See Topic 2.4 — Public Sector Econometrics and Programme Evaluation.

Regulatory capture — A specific form of rent-seeking in which a regulator created to police an industry instead comes to serve that industry's interests, typically through expertise-sharing and revolving-door staffing. — See Topic 1.3 — Market Failure and Government Failure.

Regulatory impact analysis — The document a government produces before introducing a new regulation, setting out the problem, the options considered, and the expected costs and benefits of each. — See Topic 3.10 — Regulation and Public Risk Management.

Resilience — The capacity to anticipate a shock, absorb it, adapt during it, and ideally emerge stronger than before; has the structure of a public good, and so is systematically under-supplied without collective, advance-funded investment. — See Topic 3.12 — Crisis, Emergency, and Resilience Management.

Responsive regulation — Regulation that differentiates its response by the assessed risk and compliance history of the regulated party, escalating from persuasion to licence withdrawal or prosecution only when lighter tools fail. — See Topic 3.10 — Regulation and Public Risk Management.

Results-based accountability — A framework, developed by Mark Friedman, that separates population accountability (how a community is faring) from performance accountability (how a specific programme is doing). — See Topic 2.1 — The Public Value Scorecard and Outcomes Frameworks.

Right to explanation — The contested legal principle that a person subject to a significant automated decision is entitled to a meaningful explanation of the logic involved, most closely associated with the EU's General Data Protection Regulation. — See Topic 5.2 — AI and Algorithmic Decision-Making in Government.

Risk appetite — The level of risk an organization is prepared to accept, in pursuit of its objectives, before it acts to reduce that risk. — See Topic 3.10 — Regulation and Public Risk Management.

Risk register — The operational tool that lists each identified risk, its likelihood and impact, its owner, and the mitigations in place or planned. — See Topic 3.10 — Regulation and Public Risk Management.

S

Selection bias — The specific case of confounding that arises from how participants come to be in a treatment group at all, such that treated and untreated groups differ systematically before the programme touches them. — See Topic 2.4 — Public Sector Econometrics and Programme Evaluation.

Shadow pricing — Assigning a monetary value to a good, cost, or benefit with no observable market price, such as clean air or a life-year, using revealed-preference or stated-preference methods. — See Topic 2.2 — Social Cost-Benefit and Cost-Effectiveness Analysis.

Social cost of carbon — An estimate, usually expressed in money per tonne, of the economic damage caused by emitting one additional tonne of carbon dioxide. — See Topic 4.3 — Climate, Sustainability, and Environmental Public Value.

Social discount rate — The rate used to convert future public costs and benefits into present values, reflecting society's time preference and the opportunity cost of public capital. — See Topic 2.2 — Social Cost-Benefit and Cost-Effectiveness Analysis.

Social entrepreneurship — Individuals or organizations that develop, fund, and implement solutions to social, cultural, or environmental problems, often blending a commercial or earned-income model with an explicitly social mission. — See Topic 5.6 — Innovation and Public Entrepreneurship.

Social impact bond — An outcomes-payment instrument in which private or philanthropic investors fund a provider's delivery, repaid with a return by a government or other outcome payer only if independently verified outcomes are achieved. — See Topic 3.7 — Public Procurement and Commissioning.

Social return on investment — A method for expressing extra-financial value using financial proxies, producing a ratio of social value created per unit invested, worked through a theory of change and adjustments for deadweight, attribution, displacement, and drop-off. — See Topic 2.3 — Social Return on Investment and Impact Measurement.

Spoils system — A practice in which a newly elected party fills government posts with its own supporters regardless of competence, the pattern merit systems were built to replace. — See Topic 3.6 — Public Sector Workforce and Labour Markets.

Stakeholder — Any individual or group who affects, or is affected by, an organization's pursuit of its objectives, including service users, taxpayers, delivery partners, staff, and future generations. — See Topic 1.5 — Stakeholders, Citizens, and Co-Production.

Statistical power — The probability that an evaluation will detect a true effect of a given size if one exists, depending chiefly on sample size and the effect size sought. — See Topic 2.4 — Public Sector Econometrics and Programme Evaluation.

Strangler fig pattern — An incremental modernization approach in which new functionality is built alongside a legacy system and traffic is redirected to it piece by piece, rather than replacing the whole system in one cutover. — See Topic 5.3 — Public Sector Software Engineering and Platforms.

Strategic triangle — Mark Moore's framework for testing whether a public organization's plan is sound: it must be legitimate and supported, genuinely valuable, and deliverable with the organization's operational capacity, all at once. — See Topic 1.2 — The Strategic Triangle: Legitimacy, Value, and Capacity.

Street-level bureaucracy — Michael Lipsky's concept describing how frontline staff — police officers, teachers, caseworkers — exercise real discretion over how a policy is applied, often reshaping it substantially from what its designers intended. — See Topic 3.2 — Public Policy and the Policy Cycle.

Subsidiarity — The principle that a decision or function should be handled by the lowest level of government or organization competent to handle it effectively, with higher levels intervening only when it genuinely cannot. — See Topic 3.9 — Intergovernmental Relations and Federalism.

Supply chain attack — A cyberattack that compromises an organization indirectly, by targeting a less secure supplier, software vendor, or managed-service provider that the target organization trusts. — See Topic 5.5 — Cybersecurity and Public Sector Technology Risk.

Supreme audit institution — An independent national body charged with auditing how public money is raised, spent, and accounted for, defined by functional, organizational, and financial independence from the bodies it audits. — See Topic 3.4 — Accountability, Transparency, and Legitimacy.

Systematic review — A synthesis of evidence on a defined question using an explicit, pre-specified, reproducible method to find, appraise, and combine studies. — See Topic 2.6 — Evidence Synthesis and What Works.

T

Targets and terror — A regime that pairs a performance target with severe consequences for missing it, which reliably produces the gaming behaviour it was designed to eliminate. — See Topic 3.11 — Quality, Safety, and Performance Management.

Technical debt — A metaphor for the accumulated cost of choosing an expedient way to ship software now over a more thorough way that would have taken longer; not inherently wrong to take on, but costly to leave unrepaid. — See Topic 5.3 — Public Sector Software Engineering and Platforms.

Theory of change — The explicit, testable narrative of how and why an organization's activities are expected to lead to its claimed outcomes, stating the assumptions behind a logic model. — See Topic 2.1 — The Public Value Scorecard and Outcomes Frameworks.

Traditional Public Administration — The paradigm built on Max Weber's model of bureaucracy: a fixed hierarchy, decisions by written rule rather than discretion, and a permanent, neutral civil service implementing policy set by elected leaders. — See Topic 3.1 — Public Administration Systems and Models.

Tragedy of the commons — The pattern in which individually rational use of a shared, depletable resource is collectively ruinous, absent governance that manages access and enforces rules. — See Topic 1.4 — Public Goods, Merit Goods, and Value Pluralism.

Tunnel vision — Concentrating effort on what is measured at the expense of what is not, even when the unmeasured aspects matter as much or more. — See Topic 3.11 — Quality, Safety, and Performance Management.

U

Unfunded mandate — A requirement a higher level of government imposes on a lower level to provide a service or meet a standard without transferring revenue sufficient to cover the added cost. — See Topic 3.9 — Intergovernmental Relations and Federalism.

V

Value for money — The standard public auditors use, typically the 'three Es' — economy, efficiency, and effectiveness — sometimes with equity added as a fourth. — See Topic 2.5 — Business Cases and Value for Money.

Value of a statistical life — A shadow price used when a policy changes the probability, not the certainty, of someone dying, derived from what people accept or say they would accept for a small change in mortality risk. — See Topic 2.2 — Social Cost-Benefit and Cost-Effectiveness Analysis.

Value pluralism — The idea that fundamental values such as liberty, equity, efficiency, and security are each genuinely valid, frequently in conflict, and not reducible to one common scale for calculating trade-offs. — See Topic 1.4 — Public Goods, Merit Goods, and Value Pluralism.

Value-for-money audit — An after-the-fact, independent examination of whether spending actually achieved economy, efficiency, and effectiveness, conducted by a body separate from the one that approved or delivered it. — See Topic 2.5 — Business Cases and Value for Money.

Veil of ignorance — Rawls's thought experiment asking people to design a society's rules without knowing what position they will occupy within it, as a discipline for producing fairer rules. — See Topic 3.5 — Equity, Fairness, and Distributive Justice.

Vendor lock-in — A condition in which a customer becomes so dependent on one supplier's proprietary technology, data formats, or contractual terms that switching to another supplier carries prohibitive cost or risk. — See Topic 5.3 — Public Sector Software Engineering and Platforms.

Vertical accountability — Accountability that runs between citizens and those who hold power on their behalf, most visibly through elections, but also referendums, petitions, and direct complaint channels. — See Topic 3.4 — Accountability, Transparency, and Legitimacy.

Vertical equity — Treating people who differ in a relevant respect differently, in proportion to that difference, such as a progressive tax taking a higher share of income from a higher earner. — See Topic 3.5 — Equity, Fairness, and Distributive Justice.

Vertical fiscal imbalance — The mismatch in which subnational governments are typically assigned more spending responsibility than their own revenue-raising capacity can fund. — See Topic 3.9 — Intergovernmental Relations and Federalism.

W

What-works centre — An independent body, such as Cochrane or the Campbell Collaboration, that systematically reviews the evidence for interventions in a policy domain and publishes accessible, comparable ratings. — See Topic 2.6 — Evidence Synthesis and What Works.

X

X-inefficiency — The internal slack — overstaffing, weak cost discipline, low effort — that creeps into any organization insulated from competitive pressure, whether a monopoly firm or a monopoly public agency. — See Topic 1.3 — Market Failure and Government Failure.

Y

Z

Zero trust architecture — A security design principle holding that no user or device should be trusted by default, even inside an organization's own network, and that every request for access must be verified regardless of where it originates. — See Topic 5.5 — Cybersecurity and Public Sector Technology Risk.

Zero-based budgeting — A budgeting approach that requires every programme to justify its full funding from a baseline of zero each cycle, rather than only its increment over the prior year. — See Topic 3.3 — Public Finance and Budgeting.