This article develops the concept of the "public service ecosystem" across four levels-the institutional, service, individual, and beliefs levels. It does this by integrating service management and marketing theory with public administration and management theory. Consequently, it explores both the dimensions of value and value creation within the public service ecosystem at each level, and the interactions and inter-relationships across these levels. It concludes with the key implications for public administration and management theory and pactice.

This article argues for the 'public service ecosystem' as an organizing framework through which to appreciate the interactions and integration of the institutional, service, and individual levels in public service delivery. It offers a heuristic ('Appreciate-Engage-Facilitate') through which to understand and support the role of public managers in value creation at all levels of such ecosystems.IMPACT Public service ecosystems are an increasingly influential concept in public administration and management theory. This article explores their implications for public service management practice. It offers a framework for public service managers to understand how the concept can impact upon their practice. It emphasises the need for practitioners to be able to work across the three levels of the ecosystem identified and how they might most effectively impact upon these levels.

Public services do not always create value. Rather, when poorly organized and/or delivered, they can destroy value and make service users' lives worse. However, such 'value destruction' is presently weakly conceptualized in public management theory. Consequently, this paper is devoted to the empirical examination of value destruction and hence its conceptualization. At the heart of the paper, we recognize the multiplicity of public value and private value objectives in complex public service environments and the dyadic tension between these two value constellations. Drawing upon qualitative data derived from public carbon reduction projects, we establish a conceptual framework. This framework accounts both for the types of value destruction and for the tension between public and private value. Subsequently, the framework disentangles the value destruction concept into four categories: value ignorance, value disproportion, value backlash and value exploitation. Finally, the implications of this new conceptual framework for public management theory and practice are explored.

Nowadays, policy narratives as a communication strategy are frequently used by governments to persuade target populations and obtain policy support. However, few studies have empirically examined whether and through what mechanisms policy narratives can enhance policy support intention. To fill this gap, this study uses the case of energy conservation policy to conduct a survey experiment among 300 industrial enterprises in Liaoning, China. The findings indicate that policy narratives are effective in strengthening policy support intention; this effectiveness is achieved through a mediating variable of subjective policy understanding. In other words, only when policy narratives make target populations think they understand the policy can they show strong policy support intention. Additionally, we examine how policy narratives should be designed to enhance subjective policy understanding. The study finds that a simple narrative form (i.e. reducing policy details and using images and symbols) and a narrative content with positive incentives (i.e. showing material and reputational incentives) are two measures to enhance subjective policy understanding, which then leads to strong policy support intention. The implications of these findings for the policy narrative theory and policy implementation practice are discussed at the end of the article.