Te Rā Whakamana: Situated Agency and the Art of Implementation

09/09/2025

This week’s Te Rā continues exploring what fills the so-called “implementation gap” when, as Paul Cairney (2025) reminds us, perfect coherence is impossible. I have been developing the hypothesis that implementation does not fail because communities refuse to comply. Instead, implementation is a process of constitutional meaning-making: a cycle where communities interpret and re-interpret, contest, shape and reshape delivery.

Muhammad Hali Aprimadya’s recent work (2025) gives us a framework to see this more clearly. In my last Te Rā post, I introduced Aprimadya’s argument that the “implementation gap” is not evidence of a breakdown, but rather the space where interpretation and consent are forged. This week, we turn to Aprimadya’s case study that anchors his hypothesis: Indonesian academics grappling with a collision between their teaching identity and the state’s new demands for research.

What makes Aprimadya’s work powerful is that it does not remain abstract. His framework emerges from the lived experience of academics who found themselves under pressure to become something different. Their story exposes the mechanics of implementation in real time, as well as the dilemmas that arise when new policy challenges existing professional beliefs, and the situated agency that emerges in response.

Across the following few paragraphs, I want to do three things. First, trace how identity shaped Indonesian academics’ sense of themselves as teachers. Second, follow how new research policies struck at the core of that identity. And third, show how academics responded with the creativity and compromise that Aprimadya calls “situated agency.” Only then can we ask what this means for us here in Aotearoa.

The story begins with identity. For generations, the identity of an Indonesian academic was clear: they were teachers. Aprimadya’s (2024) research shows that this teaching identity emerged from specific colonial arrangements. The Dutch colonial system established universities primarily to train civil servants and teachers for administrative purposes, deliberately avoiding research institutions that might foster intellectual independence. These arrangements became legally embedded: for example, academics were classified as “professional teachers” until 2006, and performance assessments prioritised teaching responsibilities over research output. This identity ran deep, shaping not just what academics did but who they understood themselves to be. As one academic confessed: “since I was little, I have wanted to be a teacher” (p. 13).

Then the state, chasing global rankings and research metrics, introduced what amounted to an assault on that colonial legacy and professional identity. Through document reviews, Aprimadya (2024) discovered “the proliferation of research-focused policies and regulations in the past two decades. Core to these regulatory transformations is the emphasis on publications and the incentivisation of research” (p. 12). The academic was to become something fundamentally different: a research-producer.

This collision reveals what Aprimadya (2025) calls a “dilemma”,: and his definition cuts deeper than we might expect. Drawing on Bevir and Rhodes (2003), he shows that a dilemma emerges “when a new idea stands in opposition to existing beliefs or practices and so forces a reconsideration” (p. 36). This wasn’t a new performance indicator. It was an existential challenge to both personal status and professional identity, and to what sort of knowledge mattered.

The technocratic vision of the “researcher” was in direct conflict with the ingrained belief in being a “teacher.” One academic put it with brutal clarity: “I see teaching as above all others… If you want to research, do not join universities (but join) LIPI (Indonesian Institute of Sciences)” (Aprimadya, 2024, p. 13). This wasn’t some nice professional preference; it was a fundamental demarcation of very different professional worlds.

This is precisely the friction that policies designed by He Pōneketanga for He Pōneketanga can never anticipate. The interpretive work we see in Aprimadya’s case study is the kind of work that operational policy advisors once did in the old public management era, before new public management tore policy away from delivery. The operational policy advisors were the people inside agencies who knew their delivery models intimately, who could translate broad ministerial directions into operational policy, and who did so in ways that still left room for frontline staff and communities to interpret, re-interpret, and reshape. Today, that interpretive hinge is missing. Ministers, deprived of it, resort instead to micromanagement: detailed operational policies, prescriptive guidance, endless, and sometimes irrelevant process measures and control.

But no amount of central specification can resolve these dilemmas, because they arise from the collision of meanings, not from insufficient detail. When policy demands someone contradict their professional identity, and when being a ‘good academic’ requires abandoning what academics believe makes them good, technical fixes miss the fundamental issue entirely.

Implementation only works when meaning is continually negotiated by those who hold both policy intent and delivery reality in view.

What is remarkable about this case study is how these academics responded to such a profound challenge. They neither complied nor outright resisted. That binary proves far too crude to capture what actually happened. Instead, they demonstrated what Aprimadya’s (2025) research identifies as “situated agency.”

The concept cuts to the heart of how implementation actually works. “Agency” refers to the capacity to choose, to act creatively, to exercise genuine autonomy. But this agency is always “situated” because those choices are constrained and enabled by specific context (Bevir & Rhodes, 2003). Agency isn’t abstract freedom, it’s what you can make work within the system you’ve inherited, the resources you can access, the relationships you can mobilise.

Aprimadya’s (2024) research reveals three patterns of this sophisticated response, each more compelling than the last.

First, consider the academic facing an entirely inadequate domestic research infrastructure. They developed what can only be described as an elegant solution: “So, my research is divided into two. (First), applied research, which is about what society needs from our discipline… Another one is research that I consider as futuristic (or) basic science… The limitations (on infrastructure in Indonesia) enable me to collaborate with others. So, my access is to South Korea” (p. 13). To succeed, they situated their agency in international experience and personal relationships, allowing them to honour both new research demands and deeper professional commitments.

Second, is the academic who encountered what Aprimadya (2025) terms a “mundane dilemma” (following Boswell et al., 2019). They had created something genuinely valuable: a research community for young academics working outside Java. But as they explained: “When we establish a community (and) create facilitation for young researchers from institutions outside Java, it is not recorded in the systems… It is, in my view and maybe could be confirmed with those young academics, very valuable… But it is not tangible; so there is no scoring” (Aprimadya, 2024, p. 13). Faced with the choice between officially recognised but potentially hollow work and meaningful but invisible contribution, they decided to pursue what they saw as genuinely important: creating communities for young academics, irrespective of whether the work found its way into the official system.

Third, the academic frustrated by bureaucratic research funding who pivoted towards consultancy: “Research is time-bound, and sometimes we do not get (any funding). I have not received any approval for research (funding) this year… But consultancy (work) with the government is not time-bound. For instance, earlier this year, there was an offer to ‘please help develop eco-fishing port” (Aprimadya, 2024, p. 14). This academic did not abandon their research: instead, they found a way to navigate around the institutional failures to do work that was both intellectually satisfying and socially useful.

These real responses reveal something crucial about the actual mechanics of implementation. These academics weren’t simply following or fighting rules. They did not create a shadow or guerrilla government. Instead, they were engaged in sophisticated sense-making, creatively reshaping professional practice to maintain some form of integrity whilst navigating new institutional demands.

Which brings us to the critical question: what does this Indonesian experience teach us about our own system? Aprimadya’s case, whilst specific in its cultural and institutional details, provides evidence about implementation dynamics that should fundamentally alter how we approach policy analysis. If we genuinely want to understand why public policy is stalling or producing unexpected results, we need to stop examining compliance dashboards and start listening to and for the dilemmas.

For example, where is the friction revealing itself? Is a health directive from the centre colliding with a clinician’s duty of care to specific patients? Is a digital-first strategy undermining a public servant’s commitment to serving offline communities? Is an environmental standard experienced as an existential threat by farming families whose identity is deeply tied to particular ways of working the land? Is a new building and construction standard at odds with the emerging evidence on climate change?

Once we begin looking for these patterns, they become visible everywhere. The challenge is that we’ve been trained to see such tensions as problems requiring better change management. Aprimadya’s (2025) research suggests something more profound: these aren’t system failures; they are the system. These are the sites where meaning gets negotiated, where consent is earned or lost, and where legitimacy is ultimately forged.

This resonates powerfully with our constitutional context. Te Tiriti o Waitangi has never been a blueprint or command. Its authority lies in constant interpretation. Crown policies get pushed back on, reshaped, and legitimised through practice. To label that “failure” misses the point entirely. Legitimacy is earned through delivery, where the Crown’s obligation and community authority intersect and must be negotiated.

By documenting the reality of dilemmas and situated agency, Aprimadya’s (2025) research provides a more respectful and ultimately more effective framework for understanding the people who do the actual work of implementation. Rather than seeing frontline responses as either obstruction or success, we begin to recognise the genuine creativity and moral reasoning that turning policy into practice requires.

But recognising these dynamics is one thing. Having a method to uncover and understand them systematically is another. Next week we’ll examine Aprimadya’s “decentred analysis”. It is an analytical technique that shifts focus from institutions and structures to “the contingent beliefs and actions of individuals.” It’s not just theory. It’s a practical tool for researchers, analysts, and leaders who want to understand what’s really happening in their organisations.

References

Aprimadya, M. H. (2024b). Navigating ideational dynamics: Actor-policy interactions in the implementation of Indonesia’s higher education reform [Doctoral dissertation, Australian National University].

Aprimadya, M. H. (2025). Rethinking situated agency: An interpretive framework to policy implementation. Policy Studies.

Bevir, M., & Rhodes, R. A. W. (2003). Interpreting British governance. Routledge.

Boswell, J., Corbett, J., & Rhodes, R. A. W. (2019). The art and craft of comparison. Cambridge University Press.