Australian Journal of Public Administration最新文献

The aim of this paper is to compare the focus (strategy, capacity, and operation) and locus (internal and external) of innovation types of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)-oriented public sector innovation (PSI) in Thailand and Korea and to contribute to the limited understanding of the role of national context in PSI. Our study analysed 263 SDGs-oriented innovations based on the new typology proposed by Chen et al. The findings identified that the orientation of SDGs-oriented PSI is more external and policy innovation is the most common type in both countries. These distributions, however, vary depending on the contextual differences in administrative and technological contexts, resulting in SDGs-oriented PSI in Korea emphasised on strategy focus, whereas Thailand emphasised capacity focus. This also demonstrates a temporality between strategy, capacity, and operations foci in Korea, but Thailand attempted to fill the capacity gap through SDGs-oriented innovation. Insights from this empirical study can assist public managers in selecting innovation portfolio configurations applicable to their national context.

Points for practitioners

Integrity is an ongoing concern in the public sector. Contemporary examples include fraud incidents, ethical violations, theft, and a disregard of legal advice resulting in significant harms to the public. Public service integrity management systems are interconnected frameworks of legislation and institutions intended to reduce such incidents, including Codes of Conduct (CoCs). A CoC is typically defined as a written set of norms that outline virtuous or desired behaviours, often creating or linking to sanctions for violations. Despite matters of integrity and corruption being a high concern for citizens, no method exists to compare monitoring, reporting, and review of CoCs across jurisdictions. We developed and applied a method to assess CoC implementation using specific assessment criteria developed by reviewing available content across jurisdictions and the current literature on CoCs and integrity management. Our results reveal substantial inconsistency between jurisdictions and a lack of available or accessible data for many CoC elements. Our method serves both as a tool for analysis of the effectiveness of CoCs over time and as an assessment of how jurisdictions are currently reporting on their compliance with their own CoCs.

Points for practitioners

This paper centres on expert platforms at the nexus between global climate policies and public health. Policy nexus problems have been associated with fragmentation and unclear authority. At the core, however, seem to be uncertainties about the nature of these problems and even about the nature of the nexus itself. The paper focuses on an especially rich ecosystem of policy expert platforms that have emerged at the climate–health nexus over the past decade. It outlines a typology and presents a comparison of selected policy expert platforms in terms of how they deal with these nexus uncertainties. It is argued that these platforms have developed various ways of interlinking science and policy. Insights on contradictions and controversies resulting from these ‘politico-epistemic logics’ are discussed. Mapping the nexus may inspire current research on political and epistemic uncertainty. It may also be a source of practical inspiration for developing forms of expertise beyond the standards of evidence-based policy.

Points for practitioners

Despite the increasing interest and investment in whistle-blowing regulations, policies, and mechanisms, people are still hesitant to report corruption. The existing literature explaining what deters people from reporting serious wrongdoing predominantly concentrates on either organisational factors or personal motivations. Only a limited number of studies integrate objective and subjective individual-level constraints on whistle-blowing. Using original survey data from Portugal, this article investigates two sets of individual-level factors that explain the reluctance to report corruption: employment-related characteristics (objective constraints) and perception-based definitions of corruption (subjective constraints). A regression analysis of the survey data reveals that individuals working in the private sector are less inclined to report corruption compared to public officials. This finding underscores the significance of job security in influencing people's willingness to report corruption. The results also indicate that individuals with a minimalist definition of corruption, perceiving it solely as a legal offence, are more hesitant to report corruption. This finding supports the notion that whistle-blowing policies should not be limited to reporting blatant legal violations instead of any suspected wrongdoing of corporate or public significance. Our study emphasises the need for whistle-blowing policies to not only establish secure and visible mechanisms for reporting serious wrongdoing within organisations, but also to raise awareness of how social norms and job security can impact individuals’ decisions to report such occurrences. This article contributes to whistle-blowing and governance research by shedding light on how perception-based definitions and judgements of corruption, as well as employment-related factors, can influence individuals’ willingness or unwillingness to report corruption.

Points for practitioners