Te Rā Whakamana: Implementation and Expression

26/08/2025

I use Muhammad Hali Aprimadya’s interpretive framework to argue that the implementation gap is a space of constitutional meaning-making, and that delivery in Aotearoa is never neutral.

This week’s Te Rā Whakamana takes Paul Cairney’s argument about the impossibility of perfect coherence a step further. If the authorising environment cannot impose complete alignment, what fills the so-called implementation gap? Drawing on Muhammad Hali Aprimadya’s (2025) interpretive framework, I suggest that implementation is an act of constitutional meaning-making rather than a failure of obedience: the practical state provides context and meaning, and communities reinterpret, contest, and in turn reshape delivery. My conclusion is deliberately disruptive. Public sector design and delivery are always political, and legitimacy rests on recognising that power must be shared, much more than on closing the gap with more managerial tools.

In last week’s post I sat with Cairney’s provocation that perfect policy coherence is unattainable and counterproductive, and that the drive to erase the gaps between strategy, advice, and delivery misses the point, because those gaps are part of how governing works. Coherence tends to be fragile, bound to context, and often illusory, and the lesson I took from Cairney was that what matters are the practical connections made in real time where advice and delivery meet.

The pātai that follows is what happens in the space Cairney leaves open, and how we should understand the implementation gap if coherence can never be perfected. In Rethinking Situated Agency: An Interpretive Framework to Policy Implementation, Aprimadya (2025) gives one answer. He argues that the gap is a presence rather than an absence, and that implementation is the start of a conversation rather than obedience to a command, in which meaning is made, contested, and expressed between policy and delivery, between the state and communities, and between regulators and the regulated.

He develops this in three dimensions. The first is implementation as interactive meaning-making, the exchange between a formal rule and a person’s own traditions, beliefs, and experiences (Yanow, 1987, still sharp almost four decades later). The second is implementation as individual endeavour, the quiet work of interpretation, judgement, and improvisation that every practitioner does (Bevir & Rhodes, 2003). The third is implementation as an expressive act, the idea that when people act in ways that do not match official goals they are sometimes stating their values, priorities, and identities rather than failing (Sher-Hadar, 2021, a welcome addition to my reading list). I will take these in turn over the coming weeks; for today, my point is that the interpretive turn changes how we see the state, and how we see delivery in particular.

The point has practical force, because the interpretive turn adds weight to the decolonisation critique in public administration. What Aprimadya shows about meaning-making and earning trust confirms something many of us already sense, that public administration is a constitutional practice rather than a neutral craft, and that every act either reproduces or unsettles authority.

As Came et al. (2024) and Mintrom and O’Neill (2023) remind us, and as I have argued in the Practical State series, claims of neutrality often disguise the persistence of colonial logic, with Western managerial models set up as universal standards and Indigenous systems pushed to the margins. Seeing implementation as contested meaning-making and expression requires us to drop that fiction and treat delivery as political, constitutional, and relational.

Anyone who has worked at the front line will recognise this. Universal compliance with government policy is a fiction, because people live in situated and plural contexts and problems are worked out locally rather than by decree. The same holds for the economic theories we have imported, which imagine citizens as contract-bound agents. Principal–agent models, contractualism, and public choice theory sit poorly with the settler “man alone” character of Aotearoa and with the demands of te Tiriti; they assume the path from evidence to power is matter-of-fact, and they assume ministers somehow understand the realities of particular whānau and families. When these theories drive operating models, disappointment tends to follow.

What Aprimadya brings us back to is everyday practice, in which implementation is a contested, constitutional, fluid, and dynamic process rather than an exercise in obedience. The state provides context, and communities reinterpret, contest, and reshape it; meaning is made in those exchanges, and legitimacy depends on how well the kōrerorero is conducted. In my doctoral research on free and frank advice, this is what participants keep describing: solid delivery advice, with its risks and mitigations, about how to enable rather than impose and how to support communities and businesses to make lasting differences without wasting money, rather than abstraction, theory, or relitigation.

Set beside Cairney, Aprimadya’s insight has two implications. First, where Cairney shows that coherence cannot be imposed, Aprimadya shows that what emerges in implementation is often unexpected but rarely random, and that the interpretive work of state and non-state actors helps us to see into the so-called gap. Second, what looks incoherent from Wellington may be deeply coherent as an expression of autonomy, sovereignty, or even consent, which Locke would have appreciated. The chase for perfect coherence erases this labour, and recognising it gives a truer account of delivery.

For Aotearoa, this sits close to our constitutional context. Te Tiriti o Waitangi has never been a blueprint or a command; its authority lies in constant interpretation, through which Crown policies, regulations, and rules are pushed back on, reshaped, and legitimised in practice. To label that as failure misses where legitimacy is earned, which is in the delivery system, where Crown obligation and community authority meet and must be negotiated.

This is not only about relationships under te Tiriti. Sector advocates, lobby groups, and industry bodies also operate in this space; Federated Farmers, unions, and health and education advocates all reinterpret, push, and demand delivery that reflects their lived priorities. Cairney (2025), Aprimadya (2025), Eppel (2011, 2013, 2014), and Gill (2016) each invite us, to varying degrees, to consider that interpretation and meaning-making are not confined to policy advice, and I would argue more decisively that they happen in the delivery and implementation spaces. The work of building legitimacy is done for the most part where rules meet practice, rather than in the design studio.

I have therefore decided to write a four-part series on Aprimadya’s paper, following his path. His framework arises from a case study of Indonesian academics facing a collision between their teaching vocation and new state demands for research outputs, and their dilemmas show in practice what situated agency entails. Next week we will look at how those dilemmas played out and what the responses reveal about the nature of implementation.

When this series on implementation concludes, I will turn to our other live question: policy advisory systems, and how they too are sites of interpretation, contestation, and meaning-making, along with the tools available to help guide them.

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

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, 11(2), 113–129. https://doi.org/10.1080/23793406.2024.2376018

Eppel, E. (2011). Illustrative case: Land and Water (Protection and Use) Forum. In Future state 2: Experimentation and learning in policy implementation: Implications for public management. Institute of Policy Studies, Victoria University of Wellington.

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.

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

Sher-Hadar, N. (2021). Jamming with implementation research. Critical Policy Studies, 15(3), 350–368. https://doi.org/10.1080/19460171.2020.1817762

Yanow, D. (1987). Toward a policy culture approach to implementation. Policy Studies Review, 7(1), 103–115. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1541-1338.1987.tb00031.x