Australian Journal of Public Administration最新文献

Concerns of a decline in public service policy capacity coupled with evolving policy advisory systems have seen public services seek to reform their policy capacity and practices. This article examines the flagship policy modernisation initiatives launched by the Australian, Canadian, British, and New Zealand governments. Comparative analysis reveals a shared emphasis on overarching objectives, but important differences in their design, how they are embedded within the public service, and their comprehensiveness. The New Zealand and British initiatives are found to be the most comprehensive and stable, while the Canadian and Australian approaches suffer from repeated reinvention exercises and resource and leadership precarity. An examination of these initiatives also provides new insights into understanding the trade-offs and tensions around how these initiatives aim to address public service policymaking and effective advisory system participation.

Points for practitioners

Regardless of their prevalence and considerable expansion since the 1980s, evidence concerning the impact of welfare conditionality and marketisation in active labour market policies (ALMPs) has been inconclusive and mostly limited to developed and transition economies. Using mixed methods for collecting and analysing data, this study investigates the deployment of these two policy instruments in the latest addition to the stock of ALMPs: the Kartu Prakerja Program of Indonesia. Our findings indicate positive effects derived from such incorporation of the two instruments in this new program. Specifically, we observed a high level of jobseekers’ engagement and employment outcomes. The program also shaped the development of a provider market that is of higher standard of professionalism. It, however, is not exempt from problems that seem to be of perennial nature in other welfare-to-work programs, pointing to the need for greater service tailoring and provider engagement. Impressively, the program represents an example of a genuine policy learning in both policy formulation and re-formulation during the time of crisis, given that it has been run successfully, along with various adaptions quickly made in response to changing circumstances.

Points for practitioners

Public services, such as health and other human services, are increasingly being delivered by third-party providers (providers) under contract to public sector organisations (PSOs). While often advantageous to PSOs, this creates a fragmented service context which is difficult for consumers to navigate. Further, providers often deliver services under multiple contracts to multiple funders, with high reporting requirements, high administrative costs, and low operational sustainability. Policymakers have encouraged co-commissioning—where PSOs come together to jointly commission services—to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of outsourcing. This article seeks to understand the costs of co-commissioning in Australia, and consequently the enablers and barriers to co-commissioning. This qualitative study is based on the early experiences of co-commissioning by one of 31 Primary Health Networks (PHNs). Using transaction cost economics (TCE) theory, the study explains how the PHN started co-commissioning services with other PHNs, before co-commissioning with other types of organisations. The PHN also co-commissioned relatively simple activities first, before moving on to more complex services. The insights provided using TCE theory help explain why co-commissioning is initially complicated (and costly), requiring time to understand both the services to be commissioned and the governance requirements of each party involved. While initial transaction costs may be high when co-commissioning, this may reflect organisational learning and capacity development costs - therefore, costs are expected to reduce over time.

Points for practitioners

Policy learning plays an important role during crises, where it can empower effective crisis responses or derail policy . Accordingly, a crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic has created a surge in research on policy learning. In this article, and more than 3 years from the crisis’ onset, we systematically review what COVID-19 policy learning research has hitherto offered. We take stock of 45 scientific articles to provide an account of where policy learning has been researched, what methods, policy domains, and conceptual approaches were most used, and what new theoretical and conceptual advances have emerged from this growing body of research. Furthermore, we distil the key insights it offers to both scholars and practitioners. In doing so, we point to the theoretical and empirical gaps that future scholarship can address, as well as how can practitioners leverage research insights towards improving policy learning practices during similar crises in the future.

Points for practitioners

Globally, local governments face increasing service delivery demands and citizen expectations, including in relation to community health and wellbeing. Inter-municipal cooperation is one strategy to respond to those demands. In Australia, however, there is limited empirical research about the types of inter-municipal cooperation local governments engage in and about their perspectives on community health and wellbeing. Without such knowledge, limits are placed on strategies the sector can develop and deploy to collectively tackle complex issues that extend beyond municipal boundaries. Responding to that gap in research and those consequential challenges for strategy, we surveyed municipal personnel in all 29 local governments in the state of Tasmania and included questions to quantify inter-municipal cooperation using social network analysis. Results show the extent to which local governments cooperate across seven domains and reveal that participants prioritised community health and wellbeing and described funding, collaboration, legislation, and systems thinking as ways to advance their contributions to that priority. We found social network analysis to be a useful method to measure inter-municipal cooperation; however, further research into how and why local governments collaborate across diverse service types would help inform how those services can be enhanced, including for community health and wellbeing.

Points for practitioners

Digital information and data significantly improve the efficiency of government work in China. At the same time, in order to deal with information security and data leakage events, public departments have begun to pay attention to the information security awareness and behaviour of civil servants. Based on organisational culture and protection motivation theory, this study constructed a mediated moderation model to explore the influence mechanism of grassroots civil servants’ awareness of information security. This study collected 324 questionnaires from four regions of China. Results show that organisational culture has a significant positive impact on information security awareness. Professional identity has a significant positive effect on public service motivation and plays a negative moderating role in the relationship between organisational culture and information security awareness. Public service motivation mediates the moderating effect of professional identity on the relationship between organisational culture and information security awareness. The findings of this study offer practical implications and suggestions for further research.

Points for practitioners

This paper analyses the strategic interests that inform deforestation policies in Australia, and the variance in policy selections over time. A theory of deliberate policy disproportionality is used to analyse 20 years of regulatory reform in Queensland, focusing on the Vegetation Management Act (VMA) 1999. Application of the framework to this case suggests that political executives were prone to deliberately adopt (dis)proportionate policies as a strategic response to either manage or capitalise on stakeholder support or opposition to any proposed legislative change. The high variance in (dis)proportionate deforestation policies is attributed to how political executives respond to claims made by competing constituencies regarding the costs versus benefits of successive reforms. During key reform phases, policy under-reaction was the norm, and political executives intentionally limited the scope and effectiveness of the VMA 1999 due to perceived impacts on the agricultural sector. Political executives were highly responsive to the emotional investment of rural constituents and averse to introducing policies that required difficult trade-offs. Elections offered strategic opportunities for delivering more proportionate policies that balanced public environmental benefits with economic impacts, as evidenced by a conditional deforestation ban introduced between 2004 and 2012 and reinstated in 2018.

Points for practitioners

During the past 30 years, research on policy analytical capacity's multidimensional nature and the evolution of policy advisory systems (PASs) has both increased knowledge of these processes and structures and opened new avenues of inquiry. While it is clear that changes in PASs in many countries have occurred - featuring processes such as the increased externalisation and politicisation of policy advice - studies of changes among the roles played by core policy professionals in advice provision have lagged. One aspect of this question concerns the nature and extent of changes in this ‘forgotten fundamental’ of advice systems related to how these professionals are arrayed within ‘policy shops’—that is organisational units identified in the 1960s and 1970s as the main organisational home of policy professionals in government. Whether or not such shops have changed from the central-integrated model identified in early studies and, if so, how, remain outstanding and foundational questions. Recent research in Canada has mapped the distribution of policy professionals at the central and provincial level and found more types of analysts and venues than in earlier eras— which range from the ‘classical’ integrated policy shops of the 1960s and 1970s which remain in central agencies and single-purpose line departments to the much more 'distributed' patterns found in many departments dealing with multiple or complex controversial issues. Using Canadian data, this study outlines the development of these organisational types and their distribution in government and discusses the implications of these changes for better understanding the work, and needs, of core professionals in policy advice systems. .

Points for practitioners