Te Rā Whakamana: Implementation and Expression

26/08/2025

This week’s Te Rā Whakamana takes Paul Cairney’s argument about the impossibility of perfect coherence and pushes it further. If the authorising environment cannot impose seamless alignment, what then fills the so-called “implementation gap”? Drawing on Muhammad Hali Aprimadya’s (2025) interpretive framework, I suggest that implementation is not a failure of obedience but an act of constitutional meaning-making: a process in which the practical state offers context and meaning, and communities reinterpret, contest, and in turn reshape the delivery. The conclusion is straightforward and deliberately disruptive: public sector design and delivery are never neutral. They are always political, and legitimacy rests not on closing the gap with more managerial tools, but on recognising that power must be shared.

In last week’s Te Rā post, I sat with Cairney’s provocation that perfect policy coherence is not only unattainable but counterproductive. The drive to erase the gaps between strategy, advice, and delivery misses the point. Those very gaps are part of how governing works. Coherence is fragile, context-bound, and often illusory. The lesson I took from Cairney was simple enough: what matters is not some fantasy of seamless coherence, but the practical connections forged in real time, where advice and delivery meet.

So today, the pātai that follows: what happens in the space Cairney leaves open? If coherence can never be perfected, how should we understand this “implementation gap”? Aprimadya (2025), in Rethinking Situated Agency: An Interpretive Framework for Policy Implementation, offers one answer. He argues that the gap is not an absence at all but a presence. Implementation isn’t obedience to a command but the start of a conversation: meaning made, contested, and expressed between policy and delivery, between the state and communities, between regulators and the regulated.

He teases this out in three dimensions. First, implementation as interactive meaning-making: the clash and conversation between a formal rule and someone’s own traditions, beliefs, and experiences (Yanow, 1987: still sharp four decades later). Second, implementation as individual endeavour: the quiet work of interpretation, judgement, and improvisation that every practitioner does (Bevir & Rhodes, 2003: because of course). Third, implementation as expressive act: the idea that when people act in ways that don’t line up with official goals, it isn’t always failure: sometimes it’s a statement of values, priorities, and identities (Sher-Hadár, 2020: a welcome addition to my reading list). Over the next few weeks, I’ll take these in turn. For today, the point is simply this: the interpretive turn changes how we see the state, and how we see delivery in particular.

And it’s not just an abstract point. This turn strengthens the decolonisation critique in public administration. What Aprimadya shows in the space of meaning-making and trust-earning confirms something many of us already sense: public administration is not a neutral craft. It is a constitutional practice. Every act either reproduces or unsettles authority.

As Came et al. (2024) and Mintrom and O’Neill (2022) remind us, and as I have been arguing in the Practical State series, claims of neutrality often disguise the persistence of colonial logic. Western managerial models are set up as universal standards, Indigenous systems pushed to the margins. Seeing implementation as contested, meaning-making and expression, forces us to drop the fiction: delivery is political, constitutional, and relational.

And if you’ve ever worked at the frontline, you’ll know this rings true. Universal compliance with government policy? Fiction. People live in situated, plural contexts. Problems get worked out locally, not by decree. The same goes for the economic theories we’ve imported, the ones that imagine citizens as contract-bound agents. Principal–agent models, contractualism, and public choice theory don’t really fit the ‘settler-man-alone’ character of Aotearoa; they don’t fit the demands of Te Tiriti, they assume the path from evidence to power is a matter-of-fact, and they assume ministers somehow understand the realities of particular whānau and specific families. When these theories drive operating models, disappointment follows.

What Aprimadya points us back to is the everyday practice: implementation as contested and constitutional. Not obedience, but a fluid and dynamic process. The state offers context; communities reinterpret, contest, and reshape that context. Meaning is made in these exchanges. Legitimacy stems from how well the kōrerorero is conducted. In my PhD on free and frank advice, this is precisely what participants keep saying free and frank advice is: not abstractions or theory; not religation; but solid delivery advice, with risks and mitgations, on not “how to impose,” but “how to enable”; not “how to control,” but “how to support communities and businesses to make positive differences that last” and don’t waste money.

Put alongside Cairney, Aprimadya’s insight has two implications. First, where Cairney shows that coherence cannot be imposed, Aprimadya demonstrates that what emerges in implementation is not always what is expected, and is equally not random. The interpretive work of state and non-state actors helps us to structure, or at least see into, the so-called gap. Second, what may appear incoherent from Wellington’s perspective may be deeply coherent as an expression of autonomy, sovereignty, or even consent. Locke would be very pleased. Suffice it to say, the chase for perfect coherence erases this labour. Recognising it gives us a truer account of delivery.

For Aotearoa, this resonates with our constitutional context. Te Tiriti o Waitangi has never been a blueprint or a command. Its authority lies in constant interpretation: Crown policies, regulations, and rules are pushed back on, reshaped, and legitimised through that practice. To label that as “failure” is to miss the point. That is where legitimacy is actually earned: in the delivery system, where Crown obligation and community authority intersect and must be negotiated.

And of course, this is not only about Te Tiriti relationships. Sector advocates, lobby groups, and industry bodies also reside in this space. Federated Farmers, the Integrity Institute, unions, health and education advocates: they all reinterpret, push, and demand delivery that reflects their lived priorities. As Cairney (2025), Aprimadya (2025), Eppel (2011, 2013, 2014), and Gill (2016) have invited us to consider to varying extents that interpretation and meaning-making are not confined to policy advice. They happen, as I would argue more decisively in the delivery and implementation spaces. The real work of building legitimacy is done where rules meet practice, not in the ivory tower of design.

So here’s what I’m doing. I’ve decided to write a four-part series on Aprimadya’s paper. It will follow his path. His framework arises from a case study: Indonesian academics facing the collision between their teaching vocation and new state demands for research outputs. Their dilemmas demonstrate, in practice, what “situated agency” truly entails. Next week we’ll go there, to see how these dilemmas play out and what the human responses reveal about the nature of implementation.

When this series on implementation wraps up, I’ll turn to our other live question: policy advisory systems, and how they, too, are sites of interpretation, contestation, and meaning-making, as well as the tools available to help guide that system.

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, 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11077-025-09582-9

Came, H., Kerrigan, V., Gambrell, K., Simpson, T., & Goza, M. (2024). Unravelling colonial education: from dazzling white to deliberately decolonised and supporting the case for Indigenous universities. Whiteness and Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/23793406.2024.2376018

Eppel, E. (2011). Illustrative case: Land and Water (Protection and Use) Forum. Future State 2: Experimentation and Learning in Policy Implementation – Implications for Public Management.

Eppel, E. (2013). Collaborative governance case studies: The Land and Water Forum. Working Paper No: 13/05. Wellington: 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.

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). Jakarta: ERIA (Economic Research Institute for ASEAN and East Asia).

Mintrom, M., & O’Neill, D. (2023). Policy education in Australia and New Zealand: Towards a decolonized pedagogy. Journal of Asian Public Policy, 16(1), 35–52. https://doi.org/10.1080/17516234.2022.2067646

Pressman, J., & Wildavsky, A. (1973). Implementation. University of California Press.

Sher-Hadár, N. (2020). Improvisation and policy implementation: An interpretive account. Policy & Politics, 48(3), 359–375. https://doi.org/10.1332/030557320X15888679297366

Yanow, D. (1987). Toward a cultural approach to policy analysis. Public Administration Review, 47(1), 113–122. https://doi.org/10.2307/975437