Te Rā Whakamana: The View from the Top versus The View from the Ground

16/12/2025

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 and discovered that our public sector remains intellectually trapped in the assumptions of the 1970s. The purpose of today’s post is to examine the foundational fault line that explains why.

Imagine you are the Prime Minister, standing on the ninth floor of the Beehive and looking over to Bowen Street and The Terrace, where you can see all the buildings in which the policy advisory systems are designed. You find yourself suddenly irritated as you recall a briefing from yesterday, in which your officials told you that the policy advisory systems are controllable, with clear lines of authority, formal accountability relationships, statements of performance expectation, and ministers who possess the constitutional power to direct the machinery of government, although your instinct is that they are not. You have recently been to a Work and Income office in South Auckland and a rural health clinic in North Canterbury, and there you saw something entirely different: a world of impossible trade-offs, ambiguous rules, and frontline workers using their judgement and creativity to solve problems that neither the Cabinet Manual nor any policy manual could ever have anticipated.

These two perspectives amount to fundamentally incompatible worldviews about what public policy is and how it works, because the top-down view sees policy as a set of instructions to be followed and the bottom-up view sees it as a problem to be solved. I do not think this tension can be resolved, only managed with care, and in Aotearoa the presence of Te Tiriti o Waitangi means that our version of the debate carries a constitutional dimension that the international literature has barely begun to address.

The battle lines

A clear-eyed assessment of the two dominant perspectives that have shaped implementation research for decades comes from Aron Buzogány and Helga Pülzl (2024), who frame the matter as a clash of starting points: where you begin your analysis, at the centre or at the periphery, fundamentally determines what you see, what you value, and what solutions you propose. The choice is a methodological one, and it also reflects deeper assumptions about the nature of governance, the role of expertise, and the sources of democratic legitimacy.

The top-down perspective starts with the authoritative decision made by central government actors, whether a minister’s press release, a Cabinet decision, or a legislative mandate, and it views implementation as a hierarchical process, a chain of command flowing from the political centre down through the bureaucratic machinery to the frontline. Its primary concern is control and fidelity to political goals, and success, from this viewpoint, is measured by compliance: did the implementing actors do what the law or the policy instructed them to do? Any deviation from the original intent is, by definition, a form of failure, and in Aotearoa we tend to sum such deviations up as evidence of poor coordination, inadequate monitoring, or insufficient political will and focus. This perspective privileges the view from the centre and assumes that the main challenge is making sure the machine functions as designed.

In direct opposition, the bottom-up perspective argues that the only way to understand implementation is to start at the end of the chain, with the street-level bureaucrats and the target groups they interact with. This approach, pioneered by scholars such as Michael Lipsky (1980), analyses the world from the point of view of the teacher in the classroom, the social worker conducting home visits, or the police officer on the beat. It focuses on the agency, goals, strategies, and networks of local actors, recognising that they operate in complex environments with multiple and often conflicting demands. On this view implementation is a series of negotiations and adaptations rather than a chain of command, and success is measured less by compliance with rigid rules than by the ability to solve problems on the ground, to respond to local needs, and to achieve meaningful outcomes for the people the service exists for.

Their core argument (Buzogány & Pülzl, 2024) is that, although the field has since moved towards more complex “hybrid” theories that attempt to combine the two perspectives, this fundamental tension remains the most important organising principle for understanding implementation. For them the question that matters is how to manage the creative tension between the two perspectives, rather than which of them is correct.

Two cases, two logics

In Aotearoa this theoretical tension is a lived, daily reality rather than an abstract academic debate, and two contrasting examples show how it plays out.

The Treasury’s Living Standards Framework, launched with considerable fanfare as a way to move beyond narrow economic indicators towards a more holistic view of wellbeing (Treasury, 2019), is a classic top-down instrument: elegant, comprehensive, and entirely conceived from the centre. The theory holds that if all agencies orient themselves to the same framework, and measure and report against the same outcomes, better policy coordination will follow. In that sense the LSF represents the apotheosis of first-generation thinking, rational and systematic, and designed to eliminate the messiness of competing priorities and local variation.

Yet in my experience of observing its early implementation, the LSF shows precisely the problems that bottom-up theorists would predict. Frontline agencies find it hard to translate abstract wellbeing domains into concrete operational guidance, because the framework sits at a level that is too high to inform day-to-day decision-making and yet too prescriptive to accommodate the specific local contexts that different frontline officials face. Social workers cannot easily translate “social cohesion” into case management decisions, and teachers cannot readily connect “human capability” to classroom practice. The result, I suspect, is often performative compliance, in which agencies learn to speak the language of the LSF in reporting documents while continuing to operate according to their own professional logics and institutional priorities.

In stark contrast, the Māori Communities COVID-19 Fund (MCCF) represents a triumph of the bottom-up approach (Te Kawa & MacDonald, 2023). Designed and established by Te Puni Kōkiri in response to the pandemic, the MCCF succeeded precisely because it set aside the top-down impulse that characterises most government programmes. In place of prescriptive rules, detailed application processes, or standardised reporting requirements, it devolved significant trust, resources, and discretion to Iwi, Hapū, Māori and community providers, on the recognition that these organisations understood their communities, and the specific challenges they faced, better than anyone in Wellington. It trusted them to identify priorities, design solutions, and deliver results in ways that made sense in their local contexts.

Instead of demanding compliance with a predetermined template, the MCCF made room for problem-solving, as a structure for outcomes and not for more paperwork. The result was remarkable diversity, with some organisations focusing on food security, others on digital connectivity, and still others on mental health support or educational resources. What united them was a common commitment, more than a common approach, to protecting their communities during a crisis and making sure everyone had information about vaccine efficacy to help them decide whether to get their whānau vaccinated. The fund’s success lay in its ability to let local actors respond creatively and effectively to local needs, far more than in any capacity to control what happened locally.

This comparison says something important about our system’s default settings. While we pay lip service to empowering the frontline, and celebrate concepts like subsidiarity and devolution, our most powerful institutions and our deepest instincts remain profoundly top-down. The Treasury’s influence through Budget processes, the Public Service Commission’s emphasis on standardised models of capability, and the Auditor-General’s focus on compliance and consistency all reinforce a top-down logic. We have built a system that is structurally biased towards control and coherence, even when we recognise intellectually the value of local discretion and adaptation, and I offer this as an observation rather than as a criticism.

The constitutional dimension

Here, however, we meet something the international literature cannot help us with. The classic top-down/bottom-up debate implicitly assumes that the “bottom” consists of public servants or state-funded agencies operating within a clear hierarchy. The street-level bureaucrat certainly exercises discretion, but does so as an agent of the state, deriving authority from the same constitutional source as the minister who sits atop the chain, and the debate, for all its sophistication, takes place entirely within the frame of a single sovereign order.

But what happens when the “bottom” is a partner with its own source of constitutional legitimacy, and more than a delivery agent?

The various institutions that make up Te Ao Māori and the Māori economy are not simply another set of stakeholders, nor are they simply article three entities, although where they do act as article three entities they are often the more effective ones, and worth celebrating and replicating. They are constitutional partners with their own authority, governance structures, and relationships with their people, relationships that predate the “New Zealand” state and do not derive from it. When the MCCF devolved resources to Te Ao institutions, it was doing more than exercising good bottom-up practice in the Lipskyan sense; whether consciously or not, it was enacting a different constitutional logic altogether, one in which the Crown recognised that it did not possess a monopoly on legitimate authority within this polity. Frankly, the podium spoke to a much narrower group than we are willing to accept, at least for now.

This raises a critical question that the implementation literature, conceived as it was in the context of unitary European states and American federalism, is ill-equipped to answer. Does the bottom-up perspective, with its focus on the agency of local actors, go far enough? Or do we require a framework that moves beyond implementation altogether, one that speaks of co-production in place of discretion, of partnership in place of devolution, and of genuinely shared authority between two different sources of legitimacy in place of a single hierarchy with flexible endpoints? The proposals regarding local government raise precisely these questions.

The language of “bottom-up”, for all its utility, may still reinscribe, without meaning to, a hierarchy that is constitutionally inappropriate in a nation founded on Te Tiriti. To speak of Iwi me Hapū as the “bottom” of an implementation chain is to miss the point entirely, because they stand beside the Crown’s hierarchy, or ought to, as parties to a constitutional compact, and are not at its bottom. We may need new concepts, or perhaps very old ones recovered and renewed, that can accommodate the rangatiratanga exercised by all of the Te Ao institutions as well as the discretion of street-level bureaucrats. Later this month I will argue for clearer lanes for article two and article three entities.

None of this suggests that the top-down/bottom-up framework lacks utility in Aotearoa. It remains essential for understanding the internal dynamics of the public service, the tensions between Pōneke and the regions, and the persistent gap between policy intent and operational reality, but on its own it is insufficient. Any account of implementation in this country that does not engage with Te Tiriti is, at best, incomplete and, at worst, reproduces the very constitutional blindness that has characterised Crown policy-making for generations.

The interpretive hinge

The perpetual tension between top-down and bottom-up views defines the space in which the “interpretive hinge” must operate. In my view the hinge is about developing the institutional capacity to manage the creative tension between these worldviews, while remaining alert to the constitutional questions that surround them, much more than it is about choosing a side. It requires the difficult craft of translating between the strategic intent of the centre and the operational reality of the frontline, of feeding intelligence from the periphery back to the centre in ways that can inform and improve central decision-making, and of doing all of this within a constitutional framework that the standard theories were never designed to comprehend.

Next month we turn to the people who live permanently on that hinge and work through this tension every day: the street-level bureaucrats who are actively creating policy as much as they are implementing it.

References

Buzogány, A., & Pülzl, H. (2024). Top-down and bottom-up implementation. In F. Sager, C. Mavrot, & L. R. Keiser (Eds.), Handbook of public policy implementation (pp. 116–126). Edward Elgar.

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

Te Kawa, D., & MacDonald, L. (2023). Independent evaluation: Māori Communities COVID-19 Fund. DTK and Associates for Te Puni Kōkiri.

Treasury. (2019). The Living Standards Framework 2019. New Zealand Treasury.