Hester Paanakker

I can guarantee you, the contract doesn’t matter. You can have a very bad contract and great people and your project becomes a success. Or you can have a perfect contract with terrible people and your project will be a disaster. (interviewee cited in Reynaers (2014a)). Aware of the limitations of formal control mechanisms, many, following relational governance, suggest that, in order to align values and behaviour, and to avoid opportunism from either side, attention should be paid to informal, relational aspects of the long-term cooperation too and that, trust, rather than distrust, should guide public-private interactions (Granovetter, 1985). In relation, and because of sometimes conflictive and opportunistic behaviour, the Dutch government recently developed a “market vision” entitled “Together with the Market”. This document describes a shared vision of the relationship between market and procurer based on “open and transparent communication between parties without opportunistic behaviour” (Dutch Ministry of Finances, 2016/2017, p. 15). So, what can one do to safeguard values and to understand value contextuality in the specific context of PPPs? Assuring value alignment, it seems, goes further than simply writing, signing and monitoring legal contracts. Complementing contractual and relational governance (Poppo & Zenger, 2002), hence, seems fundamental. Public procurers should pay attention to the “soft”, relational or informal aspects of the collaboration as they seem equally important when it comes to safeguarding values. Furthermore, it takes two to safeguard values and to promote good governance. Public procurers and private market parties should cooperate in that sense just as they do with respect to the technical or quantitative project output. Finally, safeguarding values and quality of governance, requires attention from the very beginning to the very end of the contractual cooperation. Apart from the contextuality of the strategies adopted by professionals to promote good governance, the meaning of the values that constitute good governance in PPPs is context dependent too. The traditional meaning and important adhered to values such as accountability, for example, changes in the context of PPPs. Some argue, for example, that traditional conceptualizations of accountability cannot be used as a measure for evaluating accountability in a non-traditional context (Bovaird, 2004; Bovens, Schillemans, & 't Hart, 2008; Rhodes, 1997). Likewise, Elliott and Salamon (2002, p. 38) argue that traditional definitions of accountability ought to be replaced by pluralistic understandings of the concept of accountability. Empirical contributions indeed demonstrate that accountability and transparency mean something different in the context of PPPs when compared to traditional 127 Value Contextuality in Public Service Delivery