How Deservingness Shapes Who We Are Willing to Help This is the third post in a series about what it actually costs to navigate the state: whether you are a regulated party or an individual and whānau trying to access a publicly funded service. Last month, I went back to the foundational 2015 article by…

Seeing Burden as a Political and Policy Choice This is the second post in a series examining the real costs of navigating the state in Aotearoa. Last month, I introduced the administrative burden framework developed over the past decade by American scholars Pamela Herd and Donald Moynihan, and asked whether the Ministry for Regulation’s focus…

The Hidden Architecture of Bureaucratic Burden This series examines a deceptively simple question: what does it actually cost to navigate the state? Not the cost to the government; specifically, the forms processed, the staff employed, and the systems maintained, but the cost to the person standing in the queue, filling out the application, trying to…

Let me be frank about the new regulation ministry’s thinking—it falls well short of what we need. Their narrow focus on cost-benefit analysis and risk mitigation feels like regulatory management 101. We should be way beyond this by now. Their ambition to be a central agency mainly concerns me. Having spent years studying public sector…

Here’s my analysis of regulatory reform and administrative burden, speaking from my public policy expertise: The conversation about cutting “red tape” often misses the crucial distinction between necessary oversight and genuine administrative burden. Let’s look at what meaningful regulatory reform looks like, using the COVID-19 vaccination rollout as a telling case study. The Te Puni…

Te Puni Kōkiri commissioned us to complete an independent evaluation of the Māori Communities COVID-19 Fund. We found the MCCF helped to lift Māori vaccination rates. We also found a strong cross-agency collaboration that ultimately supported whānau well-being at home and in their communities. There are some really important quantitative findings in the evaluation. I…

Administrative burden, as developed by Pamela Herd and Donald Moynihan (2018), is one of the clearest tools we have for understanding how regulation is experienced: not by policymakers, but by the people and organisations subject to it. It draws attention to the indirect but substantial costs of interacting with the state: what people need to…