Read through the interpretive hinge In May I wrote here about a photograph of New York’s mayor on the W train, and about how seldom our own political conversation celebrates the daily work of public officials rather than treating it with suspicion. I argued that the work of celebration is itself a joyful constitutional act,…

I look at how the unpaid labour of dealing with the state falls for the most part on women, drawing on Herd and Moynihan’s theory of gendered burden and on what raising a child in Aotearoa demands of mothers. This is the fourth post in a series about what it actually costs to navigate the…

I read Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas beside the United Nations, Singapore and Ministry for Regulation AI instruments, and argue that Te Mana Raraunga’s principles of Māori data sovereignty come closest to asking by what right, and answerable to whom, AI is governed. Under the Hood is about public administration, data, information, analysis, institutions,…

I argue that almost every briefing note to ministers is a story, with a villain, a victim, a hero and a moral, and I ask whether that story survives the journey to the front line. I have been quiet for a while, and I am finding it difficult to write this winter. Part of it…

I look at how the Public Service AI Framework defines AI, why that definition is too broad for setting priorities and too unstable across the wider debate, and why public administration changes the question to one of where discretion and public power have moved. Under the Hood is about public administration, data, information, analysis, institutions,…

I take Eppel, Turner and Wolf’s argument that implementation is always an experiment, and use the Māori Communities COVID-19 Fund to show what learning in motion looks like. Te Rā Whakamana is where we reflect on what it takes to deliver public outcomes, as opposed to announcing them. Each Tuesday we draw on empirical and…

I close the series by setting out what the findings mean for guidance and capability in Aotearoa, where the study reaches its limits, and how the puzzle that opened the thesis looks once free and frank advice is read as a bounded plurality. This is the last of twenty posts drawn from my doctoral thesis…

Each year, as we move towards Matariki, I gather the seeds of knowledge I found most valuable in the previous year and offer them to others. In 2021, I focused on good public sector governance, especially collaboration and anticipatory governance, because the authorising environment was struggling with its theory of public governance. In 2022, I…

I explain how the study found Te Tiriti o Waitangi at the edge of the bounded plurality, how I interpret that limit, and why I mark it as the constitutional limit of the mapped domain instead of adding a seventh posture. This is the nineteenth of twenty posts drawn from my doctoral thesis on free…

I argue that offering and listening to free and frank advice is political work of an astute and professional kind, set out where astuteness ends and politicisation begins, and ask what follows for political neutrality. This is the eighteenth of twenty posts drawn from my doctoral thesis on free and frank advice in Aotearoa. In…

I read Allen Schick’s warnings from the 1990s, Bill Ryan and Derek Gill’s 2011 account and a 2026 study of primary health care together, and find that all three come to rest on operational capacity, the capability we have looked after least well. This week the series reads three pieces of local implementation scholarship together,…

I explain why free and frank advice remains undefined, drawing on the essentially contested concept, the remainder and agonism to argue that a definition would take a side in the contest it claimed to referee. This is the seventeenth of twenty posts drawn from my doctoral thesis on free and frank advice in Aotearoa. In…

I read the Ministry for Regulation’s first map of the 267 regulatory systems in Aotearoa through the administrative burden lens and ask what the map does not yet show, including Te Tiriti o Waitangi. The Ministry for Regulation has published its first comprehensive map of the regulatory landscape. It is called The State of New…

AI meets public administration I open Under the Hood by returning to the Pollyanna policy argument Barbara Allen and I made about the Public Service AI Framework, and I set out the instalments through which the series will look at the institutions AI governance has to work within. Last week, Barbara Allen and I published…

I read the six postures beside their nearest analogues in the scholarship on advice and the public service, and argue that they are situated enactments of tradition, orientations a practitioner takes up for a situation, which travel across office and belong to neither role nor personality. This is the sixteenth of twenty posts drawn from…

I read a decolonial chapter and a feminist chapter from the Handbook of Public Policy Implementation beside the Māori Communities COVID-19 Fund, and argue that the interpretive hinge always works inside a policy frame that has politics built into it. This is the next post in the regular Te Rā Whakamana series. The post on…

I bring the six postures, practical statecraft and the four fault lines together as the bounded plurality finding, explain why I treat it as a sensitising concept rather than a definition, and set out why Aotearoa’s constitutional culture makes an undefined convention workable. This is the fifteenth of twenty posts drawn from my doctoral thesis…

I look at how administrative burdens fall hardest on those with the fewest resources, and at recent research showing that public willingness to ease those burdens depends on judgements about who deserves help, with examples from Aotearoa. This is the third post in a series about what it actually costs to navigate the state, whether…

I describe the shape of the six-posture solution and the four fault lines that run through it, over mandate, challenge, occasion and timing, and I explain why each one persists as a dilemma rather than a mistake one side is making. This is the fourteenth of twenty posts drawn from my doctoral thesis on free…

I recap the series so far, from fifty years of implementation research through the politics of evidence, the fault line between top-down and bottom-up, and street-level policy entrepreneurs to the interpretive hinge, and I name what the hinge cannot yet do. This is a recap. If you are new to Te Rā Whakamana, it will…

I describe the last three of the six postures in my thesis, the Moment Chooser, the Political Servant and the Westminster Protector, and explain why two of them were retained on a single defining sort and what they add to the map. This is the thirteenth of twenty posts drawn from my doctoral thesis on…

I set out what the six practitioner postures in my thesis hold in common, the four statements that recur across them, and the two-part test I call practical statecraft, which practitioners used to tell free and frank advice from advice that only resembles it. This is the eleventh of twenty posts drawn from my doctoral…

I explain how the Q-sort revealed a structure in the way practitioners hold free and frank advice, and I describe the first three of the six postures: the Institutional Pragmatist, the Democratic Constitutionalist and the Collaborative Sense-Maker. This is the twelfth of twenty posts drawn from my doctoral thesis on free and frank advice in…

I go back to the founding 2015 article by Moynihan, Herd, and Harvey, set out its three costs and its argument that burden can be a political choice, and propose a fourth cost, the burden of impermanence. This is the second post in a series examining the real costs of dealing with the state in…

I report the first stage of my thesis research, the six domains through which practitioners talked about free and frank advice, and how that material was reduced to the 34 statements later sorted in Stage Two. This is the tenth of twenty posts drawn from my doctoral thesis on free and frank advice in Aotearoa,…

I bring the interpretive hinge together in one place: the space between policy advice and delivery, the three strands of work done inside it, the literature it draws on, the people who do that work, and the limits of the concept so far. This is a side quest in a twelve-month series examining why policies…

I explain how Āta shaped the research relationships in my thesis, what being an insider-Indigenous researcher gave the inquiry and asked of it, and how confidentiality was protected in a small senior public service. This is the ninth of twenty posts drawn from my doctoral thesis on free and frank advice in Aotearoa. The previous…

I open the series by asking whether the Ministry for Regulation’s focus on cutting compliance costs is the right frame, and I set out the three kinds of cost people bear when they deal with the state: learning, compliance and psychological. This series examines a deceptively simple question: what does it actually cost to navigate…

I draw on Nissim Cohen’s work on street-level entrepreneurship to argue that frontline workers make policy every day, and that our system relies on their judgement while doing little to authorise or support it. Once a month, Te Rā Whakamana takes up a single question that is less simple than it looks: why do so…

I explain why my thesis studies free and frank advice as practitioner meaning, how Q-methodology tests whether that meaning is shared, and how the three-stage design and its analytical decisions worked. This is the eighth of twenty posts drawn from my doctoral thesis on free and frank advice in Aotearoa. Having shown that neither the…

I read four decades of scholarship on free and frank advice as three dispositions, set out the three things the map leaves out, and explain why the conditions of the convention are mapped while its meaning is not. This is the seventh of twenty posts drawn from my doctoral thesis on free and frank advice…

I set the top-down and bottom-up views of implementation side by side, test them against the Living Standards Framework and the Māori Communities COVID-19 Fund, and argue that Te Tiriti gives our version of the debate a constitutional dimension the international literature has barely begun to address. Last month, we traced fifty years of implementation scholarship…

I follow free and frank advice into the Public Service Act 2020 and its 2026 amendment, and I set out the pattern of elaboration without definition that runs across four decades of statute. This is the sixth of twenty posts drawn from my doctoral thesis on free and frank advice in Aotearoa. Having followed the…

I use Christian Gade’s three conditions to ask what we are claiming when we call a policy evidence-based, and whose preferences and knowledge sit behind that claim. An interlude on Christian Gade’s quiet clarification of what we claim when we invoke evidence. This piece sits outside the implementation series I have been building, but Gade’s…

I trace fifty years of implementation research, from top-down control to the recognition of complexity, and ask why so much of our own discourse in Aotearoa remains stuck at the beginning. This is the first instalment in a twelve-month series examining why policies that look brilliant on paper so often fail in practice. My purpose…

I look at how the Official Information Act 1982 first brought free and frank advice into statute as an interest protected from disclosure, how widely that protection reaches, and what it left undefined. This is the fourth of twenty posts drawn from my doctoral thesis on free and frank advice in Aotearoa. In this post…

I trace the four layers through which free and frank advice reached Aotearoa, from the Westminster frame and the Whitehall service to Te Tiriti o Waitangi and the Public Service Act 1912, and show how the conditions beneath each Westminster assumption have since shifted. This is the third of twenty posts drawn from my doctoral…

Where the blue of politics and the red of administration meet, and what that space asks of free and frank advice I return to the purple zone because it names the institutional space where political and administrative authority meet in practice, and because the way successive governments have rebuilt that space tells us something about…

I compare how Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada and Aotearoa carry the obligation of candid advice, and I argue that beneath four different arrangements the four systems share one silence about what that obligation requires. This is the second of twenty posts drawn from my doctoral thesis on free and frank advice in Aotearoa. In…

I close the four-part series on Aprimadya by weighing the limits of the interpretive approach against our system’s demand for speed and certainty, and argue that it may be the hinge between policy advisory and implementation research. This week’s Te Rā Whakamana concludes the four-part series on Muhammad Hali Aprimadya’s (2025) work. We have followed…

Since 2000, I have been testing a hypothesis that our traditional Westminster-derived model is under strain. My instincts have long been that we are beyond Westminster. To evaluate that hypothesis, I use the framework in Rhodes, Wanna and Weller’s Comparing Westminster (2009), from which I take five elements: parliamentary sovereignty, an opposition recognised as an…

I open the series by setting out the puzzle my thesis began with, that free and frank advice is written into statute and invoked across the public service while nobody has said what it means, and I outline what I found. This is the first of twenty posts drawn from my doctoral thesis on free…

I set out Aprimadya’s decentred analysis as a three-step method for understanding implementation, and show how we used it in the evaluation of the Māori Communities COVID-19 Fund. If, as I have been arguing, policy implementation is a messy, untidy, human process, how can leaders and analysts understand what is going on? This week’s Te…

I follow Aprimadya’s case study of Indonesian academics caught between teaching and research to show what situated agency looks like, and why we should listen for dilemmas rather than watch compliance dashboards. This week’s Te Rā Whakamana continues to explore what fills the so-called implementation gap when, as Paul Cairney (2025) reminds us, perfect coherence…

I use Muhammad Hali Aprimadya’s interpretive framework to argue that the implementation gap is a space of constitutional meaning-making, and that delivery in Aotearoa is never neutral. This week’s Te Rā Whakamana takes Paul Cairney’s argument about the impossibility of perfect coherence a step further. If the authorising environment cannot impose complete alignment, what fills…

I take Paul Cairney’s argument that perfect policy coherence is unattainable, set it beside the Performance Improvement Framework evidence and the Land and Water Forum, and argue that what matters is practical outcome coherence between advice and delivery. Today I turn to Paul Cairney’s (2025) provocation that perfect policy coherence is unattainable and may even…

I use the Land and Water Forum to show that sophisticated, plural advisory systems already exist in Aotearoa, and that this one failed because it was never connected to the people who would have to deliver its advice. Te Rā Whakamana is a regular series in which I examine what happens after policy is announced….

I pull the first six posts into one argument: Aotearoa is having the wrong fight about lobbying, and the real question is how we orchestrate a plural advisory ecosystem so that delivery knowledge is at the table. Te Rā Whakamana examines what happens after policy is announced, tracing how delivery holds or fractures and where…

I return to Derek Gill’s work on regulatory coherence and the leaky homes crisis to show that regulatory systems stand or fall on delivery, not design. The Regulatory Standards Bill drew a wave of public submissions, many of which were passionate and some astute. Most targeted the Bill’s political logic, and its potential to entrench…

I look at a Dutch shelter run by its own residents for nearly 30 years and ask what our delivery reforms would need to give up for that kind of expertise to count. Thank you for indulging me with a week off; I needed it, as we all do sometimes. This post takes up a…

I use Brian Head’s work on contested expertise to argue that delivery fails when advisory systems are built for control rather than for disagreement. Each Tuesday I offer a reflection on what it takes to get policy delivered and properly embedded in systems that work, as distinct from announced. These reflections sit beside the Cases…

Each year, as we move towards Matariki, I gather the seeds of knowledge I found most valuable in the previous year and offer them to others. In 2021, I focused on good public sector governance, especially collaboration and anticipatory governance, because the authorising environment was struggling with its theory of public governance. In 2022, I…

I open Te Rā Whakamana with Paul Cairney’s review of more than 700 studies on whole-of-government working, and argue that incoherence in the state is a design choice we can make differently. Each Tuesday I will share a short reflection on what it takes to turn policy into practice, drawing on international and local literature,…

Since 2000, I have been testing a hypothesis that our traditional Westminster-derived model is under strain. My instincts are that we are beyond Westminster. To evaluate that hypothesis, I use the framework in Rhodes, Wanna and Weller’s Comparing Westminster (2009), from which I take five elements: parliamentary sovereignty, an opposition recognised as an executive-in-waiting, collective…

Each year, as we move towards Matariki, I gather the seeds of knowledge I found most valuable in the previous year and offer them to others. In 2021, I offered knowledge on good public sector governance, focusing on collaboration and anticipatory governance. I did this because I observed that the authorising environment was struggling with…

For the last quarter-century, I’ve examined the hypothesis that Aotearoa’s Westminster-derived governance model is under increasing strain. The traditional pressure points remain relevant: the shift to mixed-member-proportional representation, evolving foreign policy alliances affecting parliamentary sovereignty, expanded use of associate ministers and undersecretaries, coalition dynamics challenging cabinet solidarity, inadequate regulatory scrutiny, and the growing influence of…

Each year, as we move towards Matariki, I gather the seeds of knowledge I have found most useful in the year just gone and offer them to others. In 2021, I offered readings on good public sector governance, with a focus on collaboration and anticipatory governance, and last year my list focused on decolonising Anglo…

I wrote this as an observation on the new free and frank advice principle in the Public Service Act 2020. Parliament had elevated free and frank advice to a principle without saying what it means, and I was worried about what the unintended consequences would be. The practice of courage is an important trait for…

As we enter the third year of examining our governance model’s evolution, the central hypothesis remains: Aotearoa’s Westminster-derived system continues to show significant signs of strain. While most indicators remain consistent with last year’s assessment, two shifts warrant attention. First, there’s a marked decline in the Cabinet’s narrative capability. Despite considerable activity and policy implementation,…

This Matariki, I am sharing my favourite readings on decolonising the state and Indigenous public management. This year, the Pōneketanga has been all about those for and against the bicultural state, while those building and running Indigenous public institutions have been getting on with the mahi. It has been a year of wahahukatanga for some,…

A year ago, I posited that Aotearoa’s Westminster-derived governance model showed signs of systemic strain. The identified pressure points were numerous and significant: the transition to mixed-member-proportional representation, the expanded use of associate ministers and parliamentary undersecretaries, the integration of non-government ministers into the Cabinet, the frequent threats to cabinet solidarity by coalition partners, inadequate…

Each Matariki, I share my favourite readings on a particular topic or research area in public management. This year, the Pōneketanga kōrero has been all about co-governance, and the readings below cover governance in that light: its philosophy and Anglo origins, some definitions, networked and collaborative governance, and how governance interacts with public policy. Philosophy…

In this post I set out what I have learned about giving free and frank advice that busy decision-makers want to keep hearing: have something to say, say it well, and remember whose table you are sitting at. Advisers need to keep in mind that ministers, politicians and boards are in a hurry, because they…

Aotearoa’s political and administrative landscape is undergoing a profound transformation that challenges its Westminster foundations. Multiple forces are driving this evolution: the complex dynamics of a post-colonial state, a hollowed-out public service increasingly reliant on non-state actors for delivery, and political parties struggling to attract high-calibre talent for senior positions. The strain on our traditional…