Te Rā Whakamana: Implementation Thoughts

17/06/2025

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, peer-reviewed evidence, and my own experience of delivery. The series presents theories and evidence in support of the practical state hypothesis.

Te Rā Whakamana means the day of giving effect, and I chose the name because implementation is where delivery either works or breaks, rather than the tail end of the policy cycle. Too often we skip past the hard questions of design, coherence, and capacity. These pieces will be short, and I hope they will be clear and grounded reflections on empirical work that help us think more carefully about how delivery systems change and what gets in their way.

In a public service system under pressure, failure is rarely the result of one bad decision; for the most part it comes from the slow build-up of too many hands pulling in too many directions. People on the ground are usually doing the best they can with what they have, but when one part of the system is chasing outcomes while another is trying to control activity, trust tends to erode and performance frays before long.

You can see this in mental health, in truancy, in climate resilience, and in responses to family violence, where there is an urgent need for delivery to improve and also a deep uncertainty about who is meant to be doing what, and why. Coherence sounds like a management buzzword, yet it turns out to be the thing that separates systems that drift from systems that deliver.

That is what drew me to Paul Cairney’s recent review of more than 700 studies on whole-of-government working and policy coherence (Cairney, 2025). It is a wide-ranging piece of work, part political science and part diagnosis, with some tough love for governments that keep promising joined-up delivery without doing the hard work to build it.

Cairney finds that, for all the talk of integration, governments mostly fail to deliver it, and the gap between aspiration and implementation remains as wide as ever.

I read this as an argument for clarity rather than cynicism. Cairney does not dismiss the value of coherence, but he refuses to treat it as magic. His point is that fragmentation is structural rather than accidental, reinforced by how agencies are funded, how ministers are held to account, how performance is measured, and how risk is distributed, and that delivery will continue to fall short unless those structures change.

To move past the slogans, Cairney gives six plain messages.

The first is to define what you mean by integration, which most strategies do not do. They reach for whole-of-government language but leave the mechanisms vague, and they name a partnership without saying who holds what power. If you cannot describe the actual shift in authority, decision-making, and incentives, what you have is theatre rather than integration.

The second is to clarify your model and your theory of change. Are you building a strategic centre or distributing leadership? Are you matching performance regimes or pooling resources? Integration is a set of design choices, and without a clear model you end up in a muddle, with agencies working at cross purposes while appearing to coordinate (Cairney, 2025).

The third is to be honest about the trade-offs. Coherence might mean less local flexibility, or it might mean ministers ceding some decision rights to shared governance arrangements, because full autonomy and complete alignment cannot be had at the same time. These tensions are real, and naming them is part of the work.

The fourth is that, if you want agencies to integrate, you have to make the case. Why is coherence worth more than the benefits of specialisation, and what exactly will be gained, and by whom, when silos are broken down? If you cannot answer those questions, you should not expect the system to change.

The fifth is to study failure in detail rather than in the abstract, looking at where integration has been attempted and has failed and asking whether the cause was weak mandates, unclear responsibilities, or misaligned funding. Cairney’s point is that the same pathologies repeat because no one takes the time to learn from them.

The sixth is to learn from success. In Aotearoa we have had moments of coherence: Ka Hikitia, the Māori education strategy; the Roads of National Significance; Whānau Ora at its best; the early days of the COVID-19 response; the Integrated Data Infrastructure; and all-of-government procurement. We have also seen too many integration efforts collapse into committee processes and disconnected pilots, or into systems that ask communities, rather than agencies, to join the dots.

The Aotearoa context matters here. We live with the long tail of New Public Management, the era that prized autonomy, market logic, and contractual separation, and its effects are still visible in our commissioning practices, our fragmented IT systems, and our siloed funding rules. We also live with te Tiriti o Waitangi and with constitutional obligations to build relational, collective, and durable public institutions, and in that context fragmentation is a breach of obligation as well as an inefficiency.

Scholars at Victoria University of Wellington, among them Eppel, Gill, Lips and Ryan (2007, 2008, 2013), have long warned that the public service’s fragmented performance and accountability regimes are cumbersome and also incompatible with joined-up working. More recently, my own work has focused on regulatory coherence as a precondition for good regulatory craft, particularly in reducing administrative burden (Te Kawa, 2023). When people say the system is not working, they are often describing incoherence: different rules, language, and deadlines, with no shared ownership of outcomes.

The task, then, is to rebuild institutional alignment across funding, planning, data, governance, and workforce, including coherence across the state itself, rather than to announce another strategy. This is unglamorous work that does not tend to build careers or feature at innovation summits or in ministerial press releases. It is the budget alignment that lets providers plan, the shared outcomes framework that prevents drift, and the systems architecture that stops frontline workers entering the same data three times. Coherence is the part of the system that makes every other part legible to the rest, and without it everything else gets harder.

As we explore implementation in the coming weeks, we will return to this point often. Whether the subject is administrative burden, procurement, or relational contracting, the core challenge is whether we can build a system that knows what it is trying to do and is set up to do it well. If we want delivery that works, we have to stop tolerating incoherence as inevitable, because it is a design choice and we can choose differently.

References

Cairney, P. (2025). Policymaking integration, policy coherence, and whole-of-government approaches: A qualitative systematic review of advice for policymakers [version 1; peer review: 1 approved, 3 approved with reservations]. Open Research Europe, 5, 75. https://doi.org/10.12688/openreseurope.19864.1

Eppel, E., Gill, D., Lips, M., & Ryan, B. (2008). Better connected services for Kiwis: A discussion document for managers and front-line staff on better joining up the horizontal and the vertical. Institute of Policy Studies, Victoria University of Wellington.

Eppel, E., Gill, D., Lips, M., & Ryan, B. (2013). The cross-organizational collaboration solution? Conditions, roles and dynamics in New Zealand. In J. O’Flynn, D. Blackman, & J. Halligan (Eds.), Crossing boundaries in public management and policy: The international experience (pp. 47–63). Routledge.

Gill, D., Eppel, E., Lips, M., & Ryan, B. (2007). Managing for joint outcomes: The breakthrough from the front line. Policy Quarterly, 3(4). https://doi.org/10.26686/pq.v3i4.4232

Ryan, B., Gill, D., Eppel, E., & Lips, M. (2008). Managing for joint outcomes: Connecting up the horizontal and the vertical. Policy Quarterly, 4(3).

Te Kawa, D. (2023). Coherence: Rethinking regulatory craft through the lens of regulated parties [Unpublished keynote].