Te Rā Whakamana: Implementation Thoughts

17/06/2025

Each Tuesday, I’ll share a short reflection on what it takes to turn policy into practice, drawing on international and local literature, peer-reviewed evidence, and real-world experience. This series presents theories and evidence in support of the practical state hypothesis.

Te Rā Whakamana means the day of giving effect. Because implementation isn’t the tail end of the policy cycle, it’s where delivery either works or breaks. And too often, we skip past the hard questions of design, coherence, and capacity. These pieces won’t be long. Hopefully, these will be clear and grounded reflections on empirical work, helping us think more deeply about how delivery systems change and what gets in the way.

In any public service system under pressure, it’s rarely one bad decision that causes failure. It’s the quiet build-up of too many hands pulling in too many directions. People on the ground are often doing the best they can with what they’ve got, but if the left hand is chasing outcomes, the right hand is trying to control activity, then it’s not long before trust erodes and performance frays.

You see it in mental health, truancy options, in climate resilience, and in responses to family violence. There’s an urgent need for delivery to improve, but also a deep uncertainty about who’s meant to be doing what, and why. Coherence sounds like a management buzzword, but it turns out to be the very thing that separates systems that drift from systems that deliver.

That’s what drew me to Paul Cairney’s recent review of over 700 studies on whole-of-government and policy coherence. It’s a sweeping piece of work: part political science, part diagnosis, and part tough love for governments that keep promising joined-up delivery without ever doing the hard work to build it (Cairney, 2025).

What Cairney finds is that for all the talk of integration, governments mostly fail to deliver it. The gap between aspiration and implementation remains as wide as ever.

But this isn’t an argument for cynicism. It’s an argument for clarity. Cairney doesn’t dismiss the value of coherence: he refuses to treat it as magic. His point is that fragmentation is not an accident. It’s structural. It’s reinforced by how agencies are funded, how ministers are held accountable, how performance is measured, and how risk is distributed. And unless those structures change, delivery will continue to fall short.

To move past the slogans, Cairney offers six plain but powerful messages.

The first is to define what you mean by integration. Most strategies don’t. They reach for whole-of-government language but leave the mechanisms vague. They name a partnership but avoid specifying who holds what power. If you can’t describe the actual shift in authority, in decision-making, in incentives, then it’s not integration. It’s just theatre.

Second, clarify your model and theory of change. Are you building a centralised strategic centre or empowering distributed leadership? Are you aligning performance regimes or pooling resources? Integration isn’t a singular idea: it’s a suite of design choices. Without a clear model, you end up in a muddle, with agencies working at cross purposes while pretending to coordinate (Cairney, 2025).

Third, get honest about the trade-offs. Coherence might mean less local flexibility. Or it might mean ministers ceding some decision rights to shared governance arrangements. You can’t have both full autonomy and complete alignment. These tensions are real, and naming them is part of the work.

Fourth, if you want agencies to integrate, you have to make the case. Why is coherence worth more than the benefits of specialisation? What exactly will be gained, and by whom, when silos are broken down? If you can’t answer those questions, don’t expect a system change.

Fifth, study failure. Not in the abstract, but in the detail. Consider where integration has been attempted and failed. Was it an issue of weak mandates? Unclear responsibilities? Misaligned funding? Cairney’s point is that the same pathologies repeat because no one takes the time to learn from them.

Finally, learn from success. In Aotearoa, we’ve had moments of coherence: Ka Hikitia | Māori Education Strategy; Roads of National Significance; Whānau Ora at its best, the early days of the COVID-19 response, the Social Investment Agency’s Integrated Data Infrastructure and Whole-of-Government Procurement. But we’ve also seen too many integration efforts collapse into committee processes, disconnected pilots, or systems that ask communities to join the dots rather than the agencies.

The Aotearoa context matters here. We live with the long tail of New Public Management: the era that prized autonomy, market logic, and contractual separation. The effects are still visible in our commissioning practices, our fragmented IT systems, and our deeply siloed funding rules. But we also live with te Tiriti o Waitangi, with constitutional obligations to build relational, collective, and durable public institutions. Fragmentation in this context isn’t just inefficient: it’s a breach of promise.

Academics from Victoria University, such as Eppel, Gill, Lips and Ryan (2007, 2008, 2013) have long warned that the Public Service’s fragmented performance and accountability frameworks are not only cumbersome but also incompatible with joined-up working. More recently, my work has focused on regulatory coherence as a precondition for good regulatory craft, particularly in the context of reducing administrative burdens. When people say the system is not working, they are often describing incoherence: different rules, different language, different timelines, and a lack of shared ownership of outcomes.

The task, then, is not to announce another strategy. It’s to rebuild institutional alignment across funding, planning, data, governance, and workforce. That includes coherence across the state itself. It’s not glamorous or career-enhancing work. It’s not the innovation summit or the ministerial press release. It’s the budget alignment that means providers can plan, the shared outcomes framework that prevents drift, and the systems architecture that stops frontline workers from entering the same data three times. Coherence is the part of the system that makes all other parts legible to each other. Without it, everything else gets harder.

As we explore implementation in the coming weeks, we’ll come back to this again and again. Whether we’re talking about administrative burdens, procurement, or relational contracting, the core challenge is the same: can we build a system that knows what it’s trying to do, and is set up to do it well? If we want delivery that works, we have to stop tolerating incoherence as inevitable. It’s not. It’s a design choice. And we can choose differently.

References

Cairney, P. (2025). Policymaking integration, policy coherence, and whole-of-government approaches: A qualitative systematic review of advice for policymakers [version 1; peer review: 1 approved, 3 approved with reservations]. Open Research Europe, 5(75). https://doi.org/10.12688/openreseurope.19864.1

Eppel, E., Gill, D., Lips, A., & Ryan, B. (2008). Better connected services for Kiwis: a discussion document for managers and front-line staff on better joining up the horizontal and the vertical.

Eppel, E., Gill, D., Lips, M., & Ryan, B. (2013). The cross-organizational collaboration solution?: Conditions, roles and dynamics in New Zealand. In Crossing Boundaries in Public Management and Policy (pp. 47-63). Routledge.

Gill, D., Eppel, E., Lips, M., & Ryan, B. (2007). Managing for joint outcomes: the breakthrough from the front line. Policy Quarterly, 3(4).Ryan, B., Gill, D., Eppel, E., & Lips, M. (2008). Managing for joint outcomes: connecting up the horizontal and the vertical. Policy Quarterly, 4(3).

Te Kawa, D. (2023). Coherence: Rethinking regulatory craft through the lens of regulated parties. Unpublished keynote.