The Cloud of Unknowing: The Theory and Practice of Public Value in Times of Extremity

This chapter explores the theory and practice of public value in an epoch of global “polycrisis” (Swilling, The age of sustainability: Just transitions in a complex world. Routledge, 2020), which poses profound questions for the future of the human species and the planet. This includes a simultaneous combination of climate emergency; profound geo-political shifts; seismic political economic, social, and cultural restructuring; and a surge of technological change involving machine-driven big data and artificial intelligence (AI). These multiple long-term transitions and over-lapping layers of existential uncertainties make discerning, creating, and sustaining public value deeply challenging. This chapter both analyzes this complex, contested, and volatile context, and discusses a range of philosophical, political, and practical ways of understanding how to re-create public value in these times of extremity.