ABSTRACT
This chapter poses questions about the nature of defining the “public” in public value when applied to supranational entities that consist of numerous “publics” which are observably different and occasionally antagonistic. The chapter presents the argument that public value creation for a supranational “public” is an order of magnitude more difficult than for a national “public,” and delineates and discusses a sequence of difficulties that arise from the creation of a supranational “public,” including: disparities in incentives; imbalances within the supranational entity; the surrender of tools to supranational public managers; and the loss of trust in supranational public managers. It deploys the lens of budgeting through a supranational entity of public managers: the European Fiscal Board (EFB), to contextualize the abovementioned aspects of supranational difficulties; and using Moore’s “strategic triangle” and Chohan and Jacob’s advisory-costings framework, it finds that the EFB’s supranational construction and its normative-advisory work poses limitations in its value-creation effort, which challenges existing arguments about the role of independent fiscal institutions in public value.
