Te Rā Whakamana: Implementation We’ve Been Arguing About This for 50 Years

25/11/2025

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 today is to introduce the intellectual history behind our current implementation predicament: how fifty years of implementation research moved from simple, top-down thinking to a much fuller recognition of complexity, and why our local discourse remains for the most part stuck at the beginning of that journey. I do not think that lag is an academic curiosity, because it is costing us money, eroding our institutional capability, and undermining our credibility.

Every minister who has watched a carefully designed policy collapse on contact with reality has asked why people did not simply do what they were told, and every frontline worker who has struggled to implement an impossible policy has asked the reciprocal question of what the designers were thinking.

We have been having this argument, in one form or another, for half a century, and scholars have spent five decades developing increasingly careful ways of understanding why good policies fail. Yet here in Aotearoa much of our political and commentariat discourse remains caught in assumptions from the 1970s: that if we design policy properly, write instructions clearly enough, and monitor compliance strictly enough, the machine will work as intended. In my experience it never has.

For the past four months I have been building our shared understanding towards this point. We began with Cairney’s (2025) provocation that fragmentation is structural rather than accidental, and that the pursuit of perfect coherence might be counterproductive. We explored how expertise is contested and distributed (Head, 2023), living in communities, with regulated parties, with Iwi and Hapū, with whānau and families, and sometimes with people the system refuses to recognise (Hoppen et al., 2025), rather than being confined to state-run policy shops. Gill (2016) showed what happens when design is severed from delivery: the leaky homes crisis was a failure of implementation capacity rather than of policy intent, a regime that looked elegant on paper but lacked the council-level expertise, monitoring, and feedback loops to detect when flexibility turned to danger. We learnt that the Land and Water Forum failed despite its advisory sophistication because it was never connected to the delivery systems that would have carried its recommendations forward (Eppel, 2013, 2014). Most recently, Aprimadya (2025) gave us a way of understanding the implementation gap as a presence rather than an absence, a site of meaning-making and action where the state is always earning its legitimacy, or failing to. Throughout, the theoretical thread has been Bevir and Rhodes’s (2003) insistence that we cannot understand public sector action without understanding the beliefs, traditions, and stories that shape it.

That foundation makes something else visible, which I call the interpretive hinge: the institutional capability to connect policy advice to implementation through translation, trust-building, negotiation, and sense-making. Drawing on the Handbook of Public Policy Implementation (Sager et al., 2024) and the Routledge Handbook of Policy Advisory Systems (Capano et al., 2025), this series will trace how that hinge functions, or fails to. Along the way I will introduce more work by local academics and by kaupapa Māori researchers who have been making this point for decades, but today I begin with the intellectual history that explains where we are.

Harald Sætren’s (2024) mapping of implementation studies identifies three generations of thinking. The first, in the 1970s, took a top-down, rationalist view. Pressman and Wildavsky’s (1973) landmark study of a failed federal programme in Oakland identified what they called the implementation gap, the distance between policy designed centrally and reality on the ground. That generation saw implementation as linear, flowing from centre to periphery, with failure meaning insufficient control and the remedy lying in better design, clearer instructions, and tighter monitoring.

This provoked a fierce reaction. The second generation, in the 1980s, reversed the perspective. Lipsky’s (1980) Street-Level Bureaucracy argued that policy is what is enacted in the daily micro-decisions of teachers, nurses, police officers, and social workers, as much as what is written in law. These frontline workers are active agents using discretion to cope with impossible demands such as overwhelming caseloads, contradictory rules, and inadequate resources, rather than passive cogs. An emergency department nurse deciding which patient to see first when the department is gridlocked, a teacher adapting the curriculum for a child with complex needs when there is no specialist support, and a case manager approving an emergency grant for a family with no food in the fridge are making policy real through human judgement under pressure, rather than deviating from it. On this view the implementation gap was an inevitable response to systemic impossibility rather than a failure to be fixed.

The third generation, from the 1990s onward, has attempted a synthesis. Its scholars developed hybrid models in which central actors set constraints through law, budgets, and institutional design while local actors retain significant agency within them. Implementation, in this account, is a process of continuous negotiation and adaptation, sitting somewhere between top-down control and bottom-up improvisation, and it is better understood as a political and social process to be worked through than as a technical problem to be solved.

This history holds an uncomfortable mirror to our own system. First-generation thinking remains the default operating model across much of he Pōneketanga. We see it in endless restructurings that promise to line the system up, in demands for centrally controlled operational settings, and in ministerial surprise when elegant plans collide with messy reality. The language of announcements, with its levers, drivers, machinery of government, and roll-outs, reflects a belief that pulling the right lever with enough force will make the machine respond as designed.

Consider the infrastructure decisions analysed by the Auditor-General in 2023 (Office of the Auditor-General, 2023). Major investment decisions were made without sufficient information, projects were announced before proper scoping, and delivery agencies and construction experts were left out of the conversation, with significant cost increases, delays, and cancellations following. This reflects more than poor execution; it suggests why first-generation thinking persists despite its failures, which is that it preserves the illusion of ministerial control that our accountability system demands. Ministers are held to account for outcomes they cannot directly control, delivered by people they have never met, in contexts they do not understand, and centralised, top-down approaches offer political cover even when most people involved expect them not to work.

The pattern repeats across health, education, and social services. He Pōneketanga celebrates empowered front lines while designing funding models and accountability systems that tend to disempower them; it accepts complexity while demanding simple logic models that fit on a single page; and it speaks of local context while creating standardised programmes that ignore regional economic drivers and community capabilities.

Some parts of the system have moved beyond this. Pockets of better practice exist in behavioural science teams, in community-led development and commissioning teams, and among experienced policy professionals who understand the delivery models they advise on, but these remain exceptions rather than the rule.

The intellectual lag has consequences. It wastes public money on reforms that rest on outdated assumptions, and it undervalues the people and processes that make policy work. Most fundamentally, it prevents us from building public institutions humble enough to accept complexity while keeping their rigour, to acknowledge uncertainty while keeping their responsibility, and to remain open to learning while still acting.

Sætren’s fifty-year history suggests that there are no simple answers to why policies succeed or fail, and that implementation is a messy, contextual, and often inexplicable craft. The challenge now is to close the distance between what we know about implementation and how our system operates, and that means building the interpretive hinge, the institutional capacity to translate between the world of policy advice and the reality of delivery. Next month I will examine the tension that makes this so difficult, between the top-down view from Pōneke and the bottom-up reality of the front line.

References

Aprimadya, M. H. (2025). Rethinking situated agency: An interpretive framework to policy implementation. Policy Studies. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/01442872.2025.2547859

Bevir, M., & Rhodes, R. A. W. (2003). Interpreting British governance. Routledge.

Cairney, P. (2025). Why perfect policy coherence is unattainable (and may be ill-advised). Policy Sciences, 58(3), 619–642. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11077-025-09582-9

Capano, G., Craft, J., & Howlett, M. (Eds.). (2025). The Routledge handbook of policy advisory systems. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003465720

Eppel, E. (2013). Collaborative governance case studies: The Land and Water Forum (Working Paper No. 13/05). Institute for Governance and Policy Studies, Victoria University of Wellington.

Eppel, E. (2014). Improving New Zealand water governance: Challenges and recommendations. Policy Quarterly, 10(3), 66–73. https://doi.org/10.26686/pq.v10i3.4501

Gill, D. (2016). Regulatory coherence: The case of New Zealand. In D. Gill & P. Intal Jr. (Eds.), The development of regulatory management systems in East Asia: Country studies (pp. 175–227). Economic Research Institute for ASEAN and East Asia.

Head, B. W. (2023). Reconsidering expertise for public policymaking: The challenges of contestability. Australian Journal of Public Administration, 83(2), 156–172. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8500.12613

Hoppen, M., Brandsen, T., & Honingh, M. (2025). Conditions for involving vulnerable citizens in co-production: The importance of commitment. Public Management Review, 28(7), 1894–1923. https://doi.org/10.1080/14719037.2025.2523953

Lipsky, M. (1980). Street-level bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the individual in public services. Russell Sage Foundation.

Office of the Auditor-General. (2023). Making infrastructure investment decisions quickly. https://oag.parliament.nz/2023/infrastructure-decisions

Pressman, J. L., & Wildavsky, A. (1973). Implementation: How great expectations in Washington are dashed in Oakland. University of California Press.

Sætren, H. (2024). An intellectual history and state-of-the-art assessment of policy implementation research and theory. In F. Sager, C. Mavrot, & L. R. Keiser (Eds.), Handbook of public policy implementation (pp. 12–31). Edward Elgar. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781800885905.00008