Te Rā Whakamana: Policy Contestability and Implementation

24/06/2025

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 for a Practical State series because the two test the same idea: that public delivery works only when it is built on relationships, trust, and a decent understanding of the ground it is meant to land on.

I call this series Te Rā Whakamana because implementation is the day of giving effect, the moment at which a system earns legitimacy or loses it altogether, rather than the tail end of the policy cycle. That matters in any country, and especially here, where authority does not sit in one place but moves, is negotiated and shared, and often begins in places the formal system still treats as optional.

This week I pick up the thread of expertise, asking who gets to claim it, who gets to ignore it, and what happens when it fractures. I draw on a 2023 piece by Brian Head, who argues that the biggest shift in modern policymaking is that expert advice itself is now structurally contested, more so than politicisation, populism, or even distrust (Head, 2023). Advice no longer flows neatly from the centre. It comes from many places at once: communities, consultants, lobbyists, industry, Crown entities, Iwi and Hapū, local government, advocates and activists, and people with lived experience. I see that as the present shape of the policy advisory system rather than a sign of dysfunction.

You would not know it from the way many systems behave, because too many still act as if expertise can be centralised and controlled. That is the legacy of neoliberal thinking, in which technical knowledge sits at the centre and is pushed out to the edges through market contracts, KPIs, and delivery chains, an arrangement that is tidy in theory and tends to break down in practice.

My argument has three parts. First, we have to stop treating contestable or non-state expertise as a problem to be solved, since it is the new normal and is not going away. Second, neoliberal governance models were never designed to handle that kind of pluralism (or technology, for that matter); they were built for control rather than negotiation, and they work best when the political issues are low-risk and uncontested. Third, if we want delivery to work, we need systems designed to work with contestation instead of denying it, which in practice means co-production, co-governance, and relational accountability, approaches that start from the recognition that no single actor holds all the truth (Ansell et al., 2021).

The mismatch is most evident at the point of delivery. When advice is contested at the front end, between officials, communities, Iwi and Hapū, industry, media, and ministers, that fracture is carried into implementation, where it shows up in who gets funded and trusted and who carries the blame when things do not work. It also shows up in who is left to interpret vague commitments without the power to make them real.

In Aotearoa this is a constitutional challenge as well as a question of policy design. Te Tiriti affirms a model of plural governance, rangatiratanga demands it, and our decentralised, third-party contract state obliges it. Yet our policy advisory system still operates as if pluralism were an optional add-on rather than a founding condition, and neoliberal models, with their emphasis on control, efficiency, and uniformity, are structurally unable to recognise this.

That brings us to trust. Head is clear that trust in expertise rests on legitimacy as much as on rigour or credentials (Head, 2023), and I would add social licence. Neither is established on The Terrace through Cabinet papers; both are earned through the long, slow work of co-production, testing, and relationship-building. If people are not part of the thinking, are not in the room when advice is formed, and do not see their realities reflected, implementation is likely to fail before it starts.

This is why technocratic systems, for all their modelling and logic, often collapse at the point of contact. They are good at designing incentives and poor at handling disagreement, complexity, intractability, and inexplicitness. They assume implementation is neutral when it is, in fact, where values collide. When things go wrong, policy advisory systems tend to resort to blame instead of learning, and they treat delivery problems as a technical glitch when they are often a reckoning for a dumb political decision.

The literature supports this. Craft, Head, and Howlett (2024) argue that the current open and contested political era demands a full rethink of how advice is formed, gathered, and legitimised. Emamian and Bagheripour (2024) show that even in highly centralised states such as Iran, expert authority must be negotiated with political and social legitimacy to be effective, and Hicks, Kingsley, and Isett (2025) demonstrate that technically sound advice on emerging technologies still fails if it bypasses stakeholder voices. Across these cases the same theme recurs: advisory systems collapse when they deny the diversity of those who hold or contest expertise.

When that diversity is ignored, the failure is political as well as technical. Communities withdraw, trust dries up, and policy that looks good on paper is quietly resisted or worked around in practice. Ministers do not get the outcomes, and often they do not get the conversation either, because the phone is always off the hook.

In our context, implementation that honours te Tiriti needs to embed relationships rather than simply consult. That means investing in capability at the edges, recognising that expertise resides in whakapapa, story, and practice as well as in spreadsheets, and building a policy advisory system that treats pluralism as a condition to be respected instead of a threat to be managed.

Neoliberal public governance does not work that way. It was built to measure rather than to relate, and it flattens context, assumes away power, treats pluralism as inefficiency, and believes advice is neutral. Governance in the complex systems we are all trying to improve does not work like that, here or now.

The question I want to leave with you is whether the system we use is designed to work with disagreement or to pretend it does not exist. If it is the latter, enduring delivery failure should not surprise us; what surprises me is that so few people are talking about how deeply that failure is now built in.

References

Ansell, C., Sørensen, E., & Torfing, J. (2021). When governance theory meets democratic theory: The potential contribution of cocreation to democratic governance. Perspectives on Public Management and Governance, 4(4), 346–362.

Craft, J., Head, B. W., & Howlett, M. (2024). Expertise, policy advice, and policy advisory systems in an open, participatory, and populist era: New challenges to research and practice. Australian Journal of Public Administration, 83(2), 143–155. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8500.12630

Emamian, S. M. S., & Bagheripour, R. (2024). The Iranian policy advisory system: Contained politicisation and emerging technicisation. Australian Journal of Public Administration, 83(2), 233–256. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8500.12628

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

Hicks, D., Kingsley, G., & Isett, K. R. (2025). Steering the future: Expert knowledge and stakeholder voices in autonomous vehicle policy reports. Policy and Society. Advance online publication.