The philosophy of New Zealand’s Performance Improvement Framework: being an insider researcher and the obligation of confidence

01/04/2019

As is the way in te ao Māori, this paper begins with the place from which the author speaks (Pihama, 2012 and Smith, 2013 ).

Ko Pohautea te māunga

Ko Waiapu te awa

Ko Ngāti Porou tōku iwi

Te Whānau a Hineauta and Te Whānau a Pokai nga hapu

Ko Pokai tōku marae

Nō Rangiora ahau

Ko Netana Te Kawa rāua ko Antoniette Crowley tōku mātua

Ko Deborah Te Kawa tōku ingoa

I am descendent of Hineauta and Pokai. The starting point of all my academic work is that: it can and must create mauri ora; whānaungatanga approaches are best; everyone and every idea I come across has a whakapapa that can be wholly embraced; humility is a daily practice, and better than pretending to know everything; and finally, my tuākana is my alpha and omega.

I am also a former public servant, a part-time doctoral student, and a ‘governance professional and policy advisor for hire’. As a public servant from 1996 to 2016, I watched the government reform, reorganise and restructure itself. Practical wisdom, indigenous knowledge, Treaty of Waitangi obligations, diversity and inclusion, and front-line expertise were not often valued in the context of daily practice. While there was much joy in my career, there was also a lot of misused energy and time wasted.

The futility, however, was not without some benefit. In the last five years of my time in the public service, as my whanau came to terms with the impact of the Christchurch Earthquake, I discovered Hannah Arendt (1995) and Bonnie Honig (2001, 2009). From their writing, I begin to examine public administration from the point of view that explanations and insights can be found in public administrators’ common and prosaic daily practice and habits. It was one of the reasons that I started to document the philosophy of the PIF so that it would eventually explain the daily practices and habits of the reviewers.

From Honig, I learned that one could learn the most when the ordinary practices of public servants are purposefully disrupted and unsettled by crises and emergencies (Bonnie Honig 2001). I also approach public management as an interpretive insider researcher (Mercer, 2007). By this, I mean I am often
recovering and recounting the stories that public administrators tell me, tell themselves and tell one another about their work, and often, about our work together. Like Geertz (1973: 3), I now believe “small facts speak to large issues”.

For this series of posts, I need to disclose I was the public servant who led the design of the PIF philosophy between 2011 and 2015. This includes the ontology involved in the first three upgrades. I say this because I want to be clear that I was not responsible for including the “value to customers” concepts that polluted the PIF in 2016. Citizens are not “customers”, and citizens have rights and
responsibilities. Customer service is one of many tools in a public servants kete – and certainly not the primary one.

I also disclose this because I need to acknowledge the State Services Commission. Between 2014 and 2015, the State Services Commission supported me to develop a doctoral proposal exploring what the PIF tells us about the performance of the public management system. In fact, that proposal forms the
basis of the information I will use in the blog over the next few months. Beyond that proposal, I will draw on already publically available information. It goes without saying I will not breach my obligations of confidence and the privacy of individuals.

References:

Arendt, H., 1995. Between friends: the correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, 1949-1975 (pp. 294-5). New York: Harcourt Brace.

Honig, B., 2001. Dead Rights, Live Futures: A Reply to Habermas’s “Constitutional Democracy”. Political Theory, 29(6), pp.792-805.

Honig, B., 2009. Emergency politics: paradox, law, democracy. Princeton University Press.

Geertz, C., 1973. The interpretation of cultures (Vol. 5019). Basic books.

Mercer, J., 2007. The challenges of insider research in educational institutions: Wielding a double‐edged sword and resolving delicate dilemmas. Oxford Review of Education, 33(1), pp.1-17.

Pihama, L., 2012. Kaupapa Māori theory: transforming theory in Aotearoa. He Pukenga Korero, 9(2).

Smith, L.T., 2013. Decolonising methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. Zed Books.