From Rangatiratanga to Reform: The Evolution of the State in Aotearoa

15/10/2024

This post offers my view on Aotearoa’s approach to public governance and why it is so fascinating: over the past 300 years, we have moved from the participatory democracy of rangatiratanga, through colonial imposition, to our current search for balance between efficiency and inclusion.

This evolution reveals not just changing administrative arrangements but fundamental shifts in how we understand the relationship between government and citizens, particularly our remembering of the importance of citizen participation and consent.

Te Ao Māori and Rangatiratanga: True Participatory Democracy

At our beginning, there was rangatiratanga: not simply an Indigenous governance system, but participatory democracy in its truest form. Authority derived from shared values and mutual obligation, with accountability operating horizontally through kinship networks. As the Waitangi Tribunal noted, citing Sir Hugh Kawharu: “A chief who persistently flouted majority opinion committed political suicide” (Waitangi Tribunal, 1987).

This collective decision-making stood in stark contrast to the representative model later imposed. Resource allocation occurred through active community engagement, with reciprocity as both process and outcome value. Rangatiratanga wasn’t merely a governance structure but a worldview embedded in tikanga: “doing things right, doing things the right way, and doing things for the right reasons” (Mead, 2013).

The Colonial Imposition: Old Public Service

The settler state did not merely introduce new administrative structures; it imposed an entirely different epistemology that supplanted Māori conceptions of collective responsibility with Western bureaucratic rationality. The Public Service Acts of 1912 and 1962 established a unitary system that centralised power under the guise of efficiency (Boston et al., 1996).

This was not just a technical change, for it also represented the colonisation of governance itself (Walker, 2004). Citizens became mere occasional voters rather than active participants, while the public service became about the hierarchical implementation of policies determined elsewhere. This shift reflected both the authoritarianism and egalitarianism that Matthew Palmer identifies as key elements of New Zealand’s constitutional culture—a curious blend of expecting strong government while insisting leaders should not see themselves as superior to the governed.

Yet this imposition did not go uncontested. Rangatiratanga was not extinguished by colonial administration—it adapted, endured, and pushed back. Across the twentieth century, Māori exercised agency through the creation of parallel governance forms: the Māori Women’s Welfare League, the Kōhanga Reo and Kura Kaupapa Māori movements, and the broader Māori renaissance all offered practical expressions of tino rangatiratanga. Legislative attempts like the Rūnanga-a-Iwi Act also signalled state recognition, however partial, of ongoing Māori political organisation. These efforts were not merely cultural or symbolic; they were constitutional in nature, asserting a different source of legitimacy and a different vision of governance rooted in whakapapa, whanaungatanga, and mana motuhake.

Pluralism did not disappear under the weight of the Old Public Service. It remained latent, contested, and active beneath the surface of state centralisation. What was imposed was never fully accepted, and what was resisted was never fully erased. The authoritarian-egalitarian blend Palmer describes has always masked a deeper tension: the settler state’s need to project unity, and the enduring presence of Indigenous authority insisting that the state was never singular to begin with.

The Neoliberal Revolution: New Public Management

The 1980s reforms marked a radical ideological shift that transformed New Zealand from a welfare state to a competitive marketplace (Kelsey, 1995). Through instruments like the State-Owned Enterprises Act 1986 and State Sector Act 1988, public services became driven by market principles and output measures.

This revolution brought both efficiency and atomization. It broke down the collective structures of the state into individual units measured by outputs rather than social outcomes. The principal–agent accountability model fundamentally altered the relationship between government and citizenry, casting people as consumers rather than as members of a political community with shared obligations (Schick, 1996).

But here too, Māori were not passive recipients of state restructuring. They were active agents: challenging, resisting, and reshaping the neoliberal turn. The Waitangi Tribunal became a critical site of constitutional resistance. Landmark claims, including the Muriwhenua fisheries report and the Tribunal’s jurisprudence on Treaty partnership, asserted a deeper normative order than the transactional logic of principal–agent theory allowed. Most notably, the 1987 Lands case (New Zealand Māori Council v Attorney-General) forced the state to reckon with its Treaty obligations in the machinery of asset transfer, ensuring that Treaty principles had to be “given effect to” in policy and implementation.

Far from disappearing, rangatiratanga found new forms anchored in iwi authority, resource claims, cultural revitalisation, and political negotiation. The so-called “iwi model” of Treaty settlement architecture did not merely absorb state structures; it contested them, forcing open space for alternative constitutional arrangements. These actions held space for pluralism, even as the state attempted to consolidate control under managerial logic.

So while public management thinking fractured the public into atomised agents, Māori continued to assert a vision of horizontal accountability, collective responsibility, and enduring whakapapa relationships. In doing so, they exposed the deep limitations of the neoliberal frame and kept alive a fundamentally different understanding of the citizen–state relationship: not contractual, but relational; not hierarchical, but negotiated; not static, but evolving.

The Networked Response: New Public Governance

Recognising the limitations of market-centric reforms, the early 2000s ushered in a shift toward a more integrated approach: what came to be known as New Public Governance (NPG). This was not a return to the old welfare state but a systemic response to the deep fragmentation caused by New Public Management. Central agencies began to see the state not as a collection of contractual units but as a system. The focus turned to coherence, alignment, and accountability across the entire Crown balance sheet.

Instruments like Managing for Outcomes and Statements of Intent reflected this shift, as did new forms of assurance, measurement, and investment guidance designed to account for long-term, cross-portfolio value (Cook, 2004). This systems view acknowledged that the state had splintered into silos, sectors, and competing logics, and that the public management architecture was no longer fit for purpose. NPG aimed to stitch it back together, not through central command but through coordination.

The NPG model emphasised collaboration across sectors and levels of society, recognising that effective public governance required engagement with non-state actors, including Crown Research Institutes, State-Owned Enterprises, iwi, NGOs, and private sector partners. This approach aligns with the concept of co-creation in public governance, where public value is generated through collaborative processes involving diverse stakeholders (Ansell & Torfing, 2021).

In this sense, the state stepped closer to acknowledging what had always been true in Te Ao Māori: that governance is relational, interdependent, and negotiated across many sites of authority. Indeed, NPG may represent the closest modern administrative echo of rangatiratanga yet. Its system lens, and its willingness to take seriously the distributed nature of public power, opened new space for pluralism. It did not resolve the constitutional tensions but recognised them. It accepted that public value is created not by central decree alone but through dialogue, reciprocity, and recognition of multiple accountabilities.

Māori responses to this evolution were again marked by strategic navigation and assertive agency. Many iwi took up roles as Treaty partners in a system that was finally beginning to understand itself as a network rather than a hierarchy. The rise of Whānau Ora and kaupapa Māori service models can be seen as co-governance in action: embedding relational principles into service design, funding, and performance monitoring. These were not signs of assimilation but signs of systemic influence. The state was no longer just tolerating Māori perspectives; it was, at times, being reshaped by them.

Our Contemporary Approach: New Public Service

The Public Service Act 2020 marked another decisive turn in Aotearoa’s public governance journey. It signalled a deliberate shift toward a participatory state, framing the public service not simply as an instrument of ministerial instruction but as a constitutional actor tasked with enabling active citizenship, upholding public trust, and stewarding intergenerational wellbeing. This turn echoed elements of the New Public Service model articulated by Denhardt and Denhardt (2000), which argued that the role of public servants should not be to control or direct, but to serve citizens through engagement, dialogue, and responsiveness.

In Aotearoa, this was a bold administrative and cultural proposition. It drew implicitly on the participatory ethos of rangatiratanga, where authority rests on collective responsibility and legitimacy is grounded in reciprocal relationships. In theory, the New Public Service reflected a move away from the instrumental rationality of the New Public Management era and toward a more relational, value-oriented understanding of governance.

Yet in practice, this vision has proven difficult to realise. The development of robust institutional mechanisms did not accompany the introduction of participatory ambitions to support them. There were few performance frameworks, limited assurance tools, and little external accountability to test or validate what counted as participation or inclusion. In this vacuum, the public service often turned inward, establishing executive boards, workstreams, and strategy groups that focused more on internal process than public outcomes.

A shift in emphasis compounded this inward focus. Rather than pursuing a representative bureaucracy in the traditional sense, where institutions reflect the demographic composition of the society they serve, the focus shifted to internal initiatives around diversity and inclusion. These are valuable priorities in themselves, but when divorced from the broader purposes of representation, outcomes and accountability, they risk becoming inward-facing, performative, and disconnected from the real world. The emphasis on values-based service also introduced a more ambiguous constitutional role: public servants began to define the “spirit of service” themselves, often with limited democratic mandate or guidance from elected representatives.

This drift raises a deeper question about authority. Suppose the role of public service is to serve the government of the day and act impartially. What happens when the service begins to define the public interest independently of political direction? As Mulgan (2003) cautions, democratic accountability requires those who exercise power to be answerable to those who confer it. The risk now is that, in seeking to empower public servants as facilitators of democracy, we have blurred the line between enabling participation and assuming authority. The state no longer speaks solely through ministers; increasingly, it speaks through officials who claim interpretive discretion over what participation, equity, and service mean.

Legal scholar Carwyn Jones has warned of the risks involved when tikanga and rangatiratanga are recognised only to the extent that they align with state structures. In his work on Treaty-based law, Jones argues that Māori legal traditions must be treated as legitimate in their own right, not simply adapted into state frameworks, but engaged with on their own constitutional terms. This means that co-governance and partnership models must reflect policy cooperation, shared authority, and distinct legal orders. Without this, the promise of participatory democracy risks becoming another iteration of assimilation (Jones, 2016).

From a constitutional culture perspective, this is a profound shift. If the Old Public Service and New Public Management embodied Aotearoa’s deep-seated authoritarianism – centralised authority in the Cabinet, command hierarchies in the Executive, and policy certainty – then the reforms of the 2000s and 2020s reflect a move toward our other dominant cultural trait: pragmatism. Palmer (2007) describes this as a national preference for doing what works, rather than adhering to strict institutional doctrine. The embrace of outcomes over outputs and engagement over instruction fits within that frame. But pragmatism can become constitutional drift without institutional clarity, where roles, responsibilities, and accountabilities become fluid, subjective, and untested.

Palmer’s insight that “our constitution is not a thing; it is a way of doing things” is particularly apt. It captures both the strength and fragility of our current model. The New Public Service offers a more inclusive, flexible, and relational public administration. But it also elevates bureaucratic discretion in ways that stretch traditional notions of political control and public accountability. The danger is not that the public service seeks power for its own sake, but that, in the name of service, it claims the right to interpret the public interest, without democratic authorisation, without structured engagement, and without precise mechanisms for being held accountable.

This journey from rangatiratanga to our current system is not merely a historical curiosity: it reveals the cultural tensions and values that continue to shape our governance approach. As we navigate future challenges, understanding these deep cultural currents becomes essential. Are we inching closer to reclaiming elements of participatory democracy present in Māori governance long before colonial structures? Or are we simply finding new expressions of our persistent cultural values of pragmatism, egalitarianism, and authoritarianism?

What seems inevitable is that our approach will continue to evolve through pragmatic responses to emerging challenges, rather than adherence to rigid frameworks. Our constitutional tikanga or our way of doing things: constantly converses with our past and aspirations for a more equitable future. This is not merely an academic question. It shapes how public servants understand their role, how citizens engage with government, and ultimately, how we collectively respond to society’s complex challenges.