Te Rā Whakamana: “Decentred Analysis” as a Practical Tool

23/09/2025

I set out Aprimadya’s decentred analysis as a three-step method for understanding implementation, and show how we used it in the evaluation of the Māori Communities COVID-19 Fund.

If, as I have been arguing, policy implementation is a messy, untidy, human process, how can leaders and analysts understand what is going on? This week’s Te Rā Whakamana turns to the practical method in Muhammad Hali Aprimadya’s (2025) work, and in particular the idea of decentred analysis. I set the method out as a three-step toolkit for listening to stories, identifying dilemmas, and mapping the expressive acts of people at the front line.

I argue that this is a practical method for rebuilding the interpretive capability that the modern public service has lost, as well as a theoretical exercise, and I use my own evaluation of the Māori Communities COVID-19 Fund to show how it works. First, though, an apology for my absence. The final stretch of my doctorate has demanded my full attention, and the public discourse has felt overwhelmingly noisy of late, dominated by immediate reactions and partisan positioning rather than the sustained thinking that complex policy problems require. My commitment in this space has always been to add signal rather than noise, and I did not want to post until I had something clear, considered, and useful to offer, with room for readers to engage. I hope this post, and those that follow, meet that standard.

Today I turn from the what to the how. Arguing that implementation is an interpretive process is one thing; having a method for understanding it is quite another. Aprimadya (2025) gives a persuasive answer in his use of decentred analysis, a disciplined way of shifting your focus to see what is going on, and of moving beyond the view from Wellington to understand the view from the ground.

Decentred analysis, as Aprimadya describes it, drawing on R. A. W. Rhodes (2018), is a conscious choice to stop looking at the world from the centre, that is, from the perspective of the policy adviser, the programme manager, the co-designer, or the minister. It rejects the idea that institutions, rules, and structures are the primary drivers of action, and instead places the individual, their whānau and family, and their community at the centre of the inquiry. Its core principle is that governance and policy outcomes result from what people believe and do, rather than the other way around.

In Aprimadya’s (2025) words, decentring “shifts the attention from structural and material elements to the realm of beliefs or meanings” (p. 8). This is a rigorous analytical reorientation rather than a soft or comforting move. When you are trying to understand why a policy is stalling, your first question becomes what this person’s world is, and which contingent beliefs and traditions shape their actions, rather than why they are not complying with the rule; it is a move from a logic of control to a logic of inquiry.

Aprimadya’s (2025) method, which he synthesises from scholars including Bevir, Rhodes, and Yanow, involves three careful steps.

The first step is to recover the stories, uncovering the narratives that people tell to explain their own actions. Citing Boswell et al. (2019), Aprimadya (2025) argues that these stories are explanations rather than anecdotes, accounts that “explain actions by specifying the beliefs and desires that caused the actions and practices” (p. 24).

The second step, with those stories in hand, is to identify the dilemmas by listening for the points of friction, where a new rule, key performance indicator, or reporting requirement clashes with an established tradition or a core belief (Bevir & Rhodes, 2003). Locating the dilemmas lets you see why improvisation or innovation is happening, because it tends to be a direct response to a specific and deeply felt conflict rather than a random one.

The third step is to map the expressive acts, analysing the improvisations, innovations, pivots, and unofficial communities that result as what Yanow (1987) calls expressive acts rather than as deviations. The question becomes which values are being expressed when an action does not fit the plan.

We used this three-step approach in the independent evaluation of the Māori Communities COVID-19 Fund (MCCF). A conventional evaluation would have focused on vaccination rates and financial acquittal, whereas a decentred approach asked more of us. Using Q-method to listen to the stories of kaitono (providers) and kaimahi (officials), together with multifactor analysis, we found the dominant narrative that explained the Fund’s success. The strongest story, which we called E hara taku toa i te toa takitahi, he toa takitini (my strength is not as an individual, but as a collective), was about making it possible for kaitono to support whānau in rural and remote places and to manaaki those in isolation, rather than about hitting targets (Te Kawa & MacDonald, 2023, p. 57). The expressive act of the MCCF was the practice of manaakitanga as well as the lift in vaccination rates; it got providers a “foot-in-the-door of some whare” and rebuilt trust where the mainstream system had failed (Te Kawa & MacDonald, 2023, p. 60). A standard evaluation would have seen the numbers and missed the meaning.

This is the kind of interpretive work that has been stripped out of the modern public service, and that operational policy advisers did before the new public management reforms separated policy from delivery. They knew the dilemmas of the front line because they were connected to it. Without that interpretive hinge, the centre is left flying blind and tends to resort to ever more prescriptive controls that only create more friction. Decentred analysis is one way of rebuilding that missing capability, a method that lets those at the centre understand the logic of the front line.

It is not easy. As Aprimadya (2025) is careful to note, the approach is demanding: it requires empathy, flexibility, and a willingness to have your own assumptions overturned (p. 6), and it calls for real engagement rather than a checklist applied from a distance. For leaders willing to adopt it, however, it opens a way out of the frustrating cycle of issuing directives and then being mystified by the results.

In the final post of this series I will step back and look critically at the framework itself, since Aprimadya accepts that the approach has limits, and consider its challenges and its potential. Between that post and the end of December I will introduce emerging work on the policy advisory system.

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

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.

Rhodes, R. A. W. (2018). What is decentred analysis? In R. A. W. Rhodes (Ed.), Narrative policy analysis: Cases in decentred policy (pp. 1–21). Palgrave Macmillan.

Te Kawa, D., & MacDonald, L. (2023). Independent evaluation: Māori Communities COVID-19 Fund. DTK and Associates.

Yanow, D. (1987). Toward a policy culture approach to implementation. Policy Studies Review, 7(1), 103–115. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1541-1338.1987.tb00031.x