Te Rā Whakamana: The Messy Reality: Pitfalls and Promise of the Interpretive Approach

07/10/2025

I close the four-part series on Aprimadya by weighing the limits of the interpretive approach against our system’s demand for speed and certainty, and argue that it may be the hinge between policy advisory and implementation research.

This week’s Te Rā Whakamana concludes the four-part series on Muhammad Hali Aprimadya’s (2025) work. We have followed his argument from the reframing of the implementation gap to the practical methods of situated agency and decentred analysis. This final post asks a harder question, which is where the limits of the interpretive approach lie. I argue that the interpretive framework provides a respectful and realistic way to understand delivery, but that its use in practice is constrained by the public sector’s demand for speed, certainty, and politically palatable truths. My conclusion is to be clear-eyed about what the method asks of us rather than to abandon it, and to recognise how it leads into our next topic, the policy advisory system and its implementation.

Over the last three posts I have built an argument in stages. In the first, I used Aprimadya’s framework to redefine the implementation gap as a space of constitutional meaning-making rather than a failure. That followed earlier posts in this series describing policy advisory and implementation systems as messy realities in which, contrary to what some ministers believe, many of our problems are inexplicable, intractable, and interdependent, and in which demands that people act and think as ministers do tend only to make those problems worse. In the second post we looked at his case study of Indonesian academics to understand the friction of dilemmas and the creative power of situated agency, and how people ignore, work around, and reshape rules. Last time we unpacked his method of decentred analysis as a practical toolkit for recovering stories and mapping expressive acts, to understand what happens when a policy or rule meets the world. The remaining question is what it all adds up to, and where it can and cannot take us.

One of the great strengths of Aprimadya’s paper is its intellectual honesty. In its final section he does not claim to have found a silver bullet; he sets out the boundaries of the interpretive framework and explains how he has adapted it from earlier scholarship (Bevir & Rhodes, 2003). That kind of scholarly humility is too often absent from public management fashions, and it is right to end this series by acknowledging it, and by weighing the potential of his approach against its practical and political challenges in Aotearoa.

The potential is real. Aprimadya’s framework helps us understand the messy reality of implementation by revealing the cultural and political dynamics that drive outcomes (Aprimadya, 2025, p. 17). It opens a path to policy design that shifts from co-designing for compliance to designing for context, for the agency of citizens and communities, and for institutional learning. As Aprimadya (2025) notes, this is especially important for emerging challenges such as digital governance and artificial intelligence, where the human element of interpretation will be central (p. 17).

Aprimadya is equally candid that the approach is not always the right tool, and he identifies several challenges that anyone in government will recognise. For me these are defining features of our own public sector rather than abstract academic problems.

The first challenge is that the approach is not a quick fix. The “demands of the interpretive tradition,” particularly the development of empathy, are slow and resource-intensive (Aprimadya, 2025, p. 6). In Aotearoa our system is built around speed: three-year electoral cycles, annual reports, 100-day plans, quarterly scorecards, and an Official Information Act that requires responses within 20 working days. A method that depends on slow, careful, trust-based work sits in direct tension with a political and administrative culture that prizes immediate responses and rapid announcements, and we are, for the most part, politically and institutionally impatient when this kind of work requires patience.

The second challenge is that the truths the method uncovers can be politically unpalatable, unsettling the clean and tidy narratives that political leaders like to project (Aprimadya, 2025, p. 17). Aotearoa has a highly centralised and adversarial political system, made worse in my view by the importation of foreign culture wars. An interpretive finding that a flagship policy is failing on the ground is unlikely to be received as an insight for learning; it is far more likely to be used as evidence of ministerial failure, or buried by a department to protect its minister from exactly that. Our political culture tends to punish the admission of messy reality, which creates a strong incentive to ignore it.

The third challenge is that the approach resists universalism. Its assumption that local context is king and queen sits uneasily with government systems that search for a single, scalable model of best practice (Aprimadya, 2025, p. 17), and in Aotearoa this exposes the tension at the heart of our assumed constitutional arrangements. A uniform approach is at odds with the guarantees of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, which requires the Crown to engage with the specific, diverse, and sovereign contexts of Iwi and Hapū, as well as whānau. Articles One and Two are always in negotiation with one another, and for each policy matter we need to understand how the two speak to each other so that we can find the right point of balance between them. The guarantees of equal access, participation, and outcomes in Article Three mean that the context of whānau matters to successful delivery. The interpretive approach supports the case for bespoke, locally negotiated solutions, while the machinery of government is still largely geared to standardised, centralised programmes that serve those best placed to reach them, which, to be honest, tends to mean people with resources who live close to urban delivery points.

Working through these tensions is more than an academic exercise for me. For a long time my own work has sat between two strong ways of seeing the world. On the one hand, postcolonial and decolonial approaches rightly demand that we attend to power, history, and the ways colonial logics persist in our public institutions (Bakshi, 2021; Barrett et al., 2023; Came et al., 2024; Didier, 2025; Haque, 2019; Matsiliza, 2020; Mintrom & O’Neill, 2023; Nisar, 2023; Zvoushe & Uwizeyimana, 2025; see also the Waitangi Tribunal Thursdays series). For me this lens is essential and non-negotiable. On the other hand, structuration theory, particularly Giddens (1984) and the work of Bill Ryan, who grounded it for us locally, gives a persuasive account of the duality of structure and agency: how systems shape actions, and how those actions reproduce or change the systems over time. Both are true and useful, but they can be hard to reconcile in practice, because the macro focus on unsettling colonial structures and the assumptions of the settler state can sometimes overshadow the micro practices of individual agency, and the reverse is also true.

This is why the interpretive tradition in public administration, and Aprimadya’s adaptation of it, feels so valuable to me now. It does not resolve the tension, but it gives a practical starting point. The work of Dvora Yanow (2000) on policy as a process of meaning-making, and of Mark Bevir and R. A. W. Rhodes (2003), provides a method that begins with actors in their specific context. It lets us listen to their stories and understand their dilemmas without losing sight of the structures they are working within, so that actors and system appear in a single frame, along with the ways they understand, and misunderstand, one another. It suits me because it supports research that is empirically grounded, respectful of meaning-making, and still critical of the power structures within which everyone acts.

It also suits what comes next. For the foreseeable future, Te Rā Whakamana will move back and forth between the policy advisory and implementation literatures, on the working hypothesis that the interpretive lens may be the hinge that connects them. Over the coming months I will use it, and in particular the ideas offered by Aprimadya and others in the interpretive tradition, to examine policy advisory systems research in detail and to consider how its ideas might improve delivery in Aotearoa. These systems are not the neutral, technical machines they are often presented as, and as Cairney (2025) suggests, they are not always coherent. They are complex human systems, populated by contesting actors with their own beliefs, traditions, dilemmas, and situated agency, and in Aotearoa they often include more non-state actors than state actors. The question I will be asking is what we need to know about the inner life of these systems to help them better support the messy, untidy, human craft of implementation.

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

Bakshi, S. (2021). Towards the unmaking of canons: Decolonising the study of literature. In Doing equity and diversity for success in higher education: Redressing structural inequalities in the academy (pp. 117–126). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65668-3_9

Barrett, N. M., Burrows, L., Atatoa-Carr, P., & Smith, L. T. (2023). Reflections on the co-design process of a holistic assessment tool for a Kaupapa Māori antenatal wānanga (workshop). Kōtuitui: New Zealand Journal of Social Sciences Online, 19(3), 217–237. https://doi.org/10.1080/1177083X.2023.2236685

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

Didier, N. (2025). Decolonizing public administration in Latin America: A systematic literature review of trending discussions in the region. Public Administration and Development. https://doi.org/10.1002/pad.2092

Giddens, A. (1984). The constitution of society: Outline of the theory of structuration. Polity Press.

Haque, M. S. (2019). Questioning cross-cultural applicability of public administration knowledge: A critical Asian perspective. Asia Pacific Journal of Public Administration, 41(2), 110–118. https://doi.org/10.1080/23276665.2019.1614747

Matsiliza, N. S. (2020). Decolonisation in the field of public administration: The responsiveness of the scholarship of teaching and learning. Teaching Public Administration, 38(3), 295–312.

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

Nisar, M. A. (2023). Decolonization and public administration: Frustrated ramblings of a spoilsport. Administrative Theory & Praxis, 45(2), 147–157. https://doi.org/10.1080/10841806.2022.2112456

Yanow, D. (2000). Conducting interpretive policy analysis. Sage. Zvoushe, H., & Uwizeyimana, D. E. (2025). Complexities of decolonising African public administration in the neoliberal world. Cogent Education, 12(1), Article 2563705. https://doi.org/10.1080/2331186X.2025.2563705