Green public ethics: exploring and elaborating value conflict handling of public administrators

Public administrators are increasingly pressured to take judgement in critical value conflicts of great relevance to sustainable development and public ethics. This project explores and elaborates on how this is handled by public organizations and administrators. The project: 1) maps value conflict handling among administrators and how they make sense of and justify them; 2) takes departure in the literature of sustainable development and public ethics to critically assess what normative positions administrators embrace and neglect; 3) develops guidelines for how green public ethics can be applied in practice, which can strengthen the ethical awareness of public administrators. The project contributes to the value pluralism debate in public administration, it cast new light on the nature of green value conflict handling in public administrations and develop elaborated insights on what green public ethics actually mean and could mean in practice.