Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
New Zealand public administration has shifted significantly since the famous ‘New Zealand model’ of the 1980s, and continues to evolve. This informs two challenges for readers – for international readers, to find lessons from New Zealand’s experience that they can apply in their jurisdictions, and for New Zealand public servants, to pick up the baton and contribute the next chapters of the story. The story told presents a new way of thinking about discretion – motivated by clear missions and a spirit of service to the community, and shaped by an ethical culture. New Zealand’s evolving approach to public administration was stress-tested and informed by the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic, and other recent New Zealand crises both natural and human-made, and it weathered these tests well. However, the reforms are not complete, and the hardest steps may still be to come – this chapter describes some of the unfinished work of New Zealand public administration reform and the challenges ahead.
This book provides an updated account of New Zealand public administration, including insider stories of leading reform.
Hailed for its distinctiveness and high performance, New Zealand’s radical public service reforms of the 1980s were studied, praised, criticised, and emulated around the world.
However, New Zealand has not stood still. The 80s model had tremendous strengths, reducing some problems but also creating new problems and exacerbating others. More recent reforms layered cultural and behavioural approaches on top of earlier changes.
This book, co-authored by the head of the New Zealand public service, describes decades of change, what worked, what didn’t, and what challenges remain.
Coordination is the holy grail of public administration, and fragmentation the defining critique of New Zealand’s 1980s model. Multiple categories of problems cross agency boundaries, and coordination is not one single solution. New Zealand now takes an explicitly contingent approach to matching different problem types with an expanded toolkit of solutions, including collaborative governance approaches and designated ‘system leaders’ of varying formality. However, these mechanical improvements must be complemented by a culture change that shifts emphasis away from separate agency identities and instead towards more unified identities (clan models) and shared missions (network models). Significant progress has been made on coordination between central government agencies, but further work is required on partnerships with parties outside the central government.
Public servants are people, with their own culture, traditions, and values. New Public Management, with its focus on contractualism and incentives, and assumptions of self-interest, threatened to ‘burn down the village’ of public service. The focus of recent public service reform has been on rebuilding the culture and values of the public service village, to help New Zealand public servants to better serve their communities. A cultural approach, in contrast with a compliance approach, was chosen because it was complementary to the discretion of the 1980s model. Public service values are drawn from the public values in which there is normative consensus in society. While the machinery of New Zealand’s government is largely inherited from Westminster, the culture and values are influenced by the diverse cultures of New Zealand in which public servants live. New Zealand is often described as ‘bicultural’, with Māori and ‘Pākehā’, or New Zealand Europeans, being the two largest ethnic groups. There are many public service values, but in this book, discussion is thematically grouped around the values of stewardship, purpose, inclusion, open government, and coordination.
The New Zealand public service was once dominated by White men, particularly in senior leadership roles. Now, women, Māori, and members of the rainbow community are represented in the most senior roles in the public service at rates proportional to the population. Work in the 1980s and 1990s focused on removing barriers to employment and promotion, known as ‘equal employment opportunity’. More recent work has seen the focus shift from ‘diversity management’, aiming to make teams more diverse, to creating a climate of ‘inclusion’, where people are supported to belong while also being valued for their differences. Public servants are still recruited and promoted based on being judged as the most suitable for the role (‘merit’), and not for being in one demographic group or another. The more diverse public service is now assumed to be better able to understand the diverse communities that it serves. Tensions continue to exist in representative bureaucracy between concepts of public servants that ‘reflect’ versus ‘represent’ the groups with which they identify.
New Zealand’s famous reforms of the 1980s removed bureaucratic rules in favour of accountability for results. The resulting administrative discretion unleashed the creativity and innovation of public servants. This was credited with improving efficiency, but the focus on self-interested incentives risked creating a public service that would lose its heart. And so, the 2011–2024 period saw a new era of reform oriented around a new metaphor. Early public administration had followed the metaphor of the machine – public servants were cogs, whose work should be constrained by standard operating procedures. The 1980s vogue saw the machine replaced with the contract – public servants were reimagined as suppliers who would enter into agreements on the quality and quantity of outputs they would produce. Contemporary reform has followed the metaphor of the public service as a mini-society, with its own culture and values. Those values have a normative effect to orient public servants to act in desirable ways. Cultures are perpetrated by stories, and this book presents a story of how New Zealand public service culture was intentionally cultivated. The authors take an interpretivist approach to cataloguing public service reform.
New Zealand is a remote young country, first inhabited by Polynesian explorers and now shared with European settlers. A foundational document was the Treaty of Waitangi, an agreement between the indigenous Māori people and representatives of the British Crown. Early New Zealand public administration was modelled on Westminster and featured limited discretion with practices described in various manuals, consistent with ‘traditional public administration’. In the 1980s, a fiscal crisis triggered radical reforms. Inspired by organisational theory and transaction cost economics, bureaucratic rules were eliminated, and public servants were instead reimagined as suppliers managed by contracts. Ministers would ‘purchase’, on behalf of citizens, the goods and services they required from agencies. While different to other nations, New Zealand was also described as exemplifying the ‘New Public Management’ trend. Although the direct evidence is difficult to interpret, eyewitness accounts suggest that the gains were substantial. And yet, the reforms of the 1980s created a public service that was fragmented, focused on delivering outputs irrespective of social outcomes, and unable to adequately respond to ambiguity or in-year variation. By 2011, the old system had worn down but had not yet been replaced by something new.
Open government is not a new concept, with freedom of information movements following the conclusion of the Second World War, a focus on accountability under the New Public Management movement of the 1980s, and a techno-optimistic view that digitisation would support greater democratic participation in the early 2000s. Nonetheless, open government has entered a new phase of global importance following Barack Obama’s Open Government Directive in 2009. New Zealand’s recent approach has been to foster a culture of open government – requiring public servants to act with openness within the discretion afforded to them. Transparency is improved by proactive release of advice to ministers and papers discussed by Cabinet. Accountability is supported by leaders proactively taking public responsibility for adverse outcomes and committing to making things right. Public servants are expected to support public participation by utilising participatory tools where practicable. This chapter documents the incomplete progress to make the New Zealand government more open.
The motivations of public servants differ on average from those observed in other fields. Internationally, this is known as ‘public service motivation’, and in New Zealand, as ‘a spirit of service to the community’. The reforms of the 1980s assumed that public servants were self-interested and would respond to incentives. In reality, public servants are humans and therefore display a range of motivations, some selfish and some selfless or altruistic. Public servants can be supported to achieve great things when their spirit of service to the community is nurtured. A spirit of service to the community is a boundary object that unifies public servants but means different things. Recent reform efforts have aimed to recruit and promote public servants who demonstrate a spirit of service, provide a supportive environment that cultivates a spirit of service, and orient public servants towards the achievement of important organisational missions.
Stewardship is an increasingly popular term in public administration discourse, but with inconsistent usage that risks turning into a ‘magical concept’. In New Zealand, stewardship has come to mean the moral responsibility to care for treasures handed down from past public servants to be held for future generations. Stewardship includes both tangible and intangible treasures, and this book places greater emphasis on the intangible: public trust and confidence; relationships; culture and values; and the human capability of public servants to deliver. Stewardship in New Zealand needs to be viewed in the context of an increasingly distinct and delegated public service bargain. Ministers purchase goods and services, and public servants must take responsibility for ensuring the public service is actively managed to deliver while acting consistently with public ethical expectations. The public service leadership team is a group of department chief executives that have taken on the moniker of collective stewards for the public service, and who collectively lead public service reform.
