Te Rā Whakamana: Implementation We’ve Been Arguing About This for 50 Years

25/11/2025

This is the first instalment in a twelve-month series examining why policies that look brilliant on paper fail so spectacularly in practice. Today’s purpose is straightforward: to introduce the intellectual history that explains our current ‘implementation’ predicament. By the end, you will understand how fifty years of implementation research moved from simple, top-down thinking to a sophisticated recognition of complexity, and you will ask why our local discourse remains stuck at the beginning of that journey. That intellectual lag is not an academic curiosity. It is costing us money, eroding our institutional capability, and undermining our credibility.

Every minister who has watched a carefully designed policy collapse on contact with reality has asked the same question: why didn’t they just do what we told them? Every frontline worker who has struggled to implement an impossible policy has asked the reciprocal question: what were they thinking?

We have been having this argument, in various forms, for half a century. Scholars have spent five decades developing increasingly sophisticated ways to understand why good policies fail. Yet here in Aotearoa, much of our political and commentariat discourse remains intellectually trapped in assumptions from the 1970s: that if we just design policy properly, write instructions clearly enough, and monitor compliance strictly enough, the machine will work as intended. It will not. It never has.

For the past four months, I have been building our shared understanding towards this point. We began with Cairney’s (2025) provocation that fragmentation is structural, not accidental, and that the chase for perfect coherence might be counterproductive. We explored how expertise is contested and distributed (Head, 2023), and not confined to state-run policy shops but alive in communities, with regulated parties, with Iwi and Hapū, as well as whānau and families, and sometimes with the people the system refuses to recognise (Hoppen et al., 2025). Gill (2016) showed us what happens when design is severed from delivery: the leaky homes crisis was not a failure of policy intent but of implementation capacity: a regime that looked elegant on paper but lacked the council-level expertise, monitoring, and feedback loops to detect when flexibility turned to danger. We also learnt about the Land and Water Forum’s failure, despite its advisory sophistication, because it was never wired into the delivery systems that would have carried its recommendations forward (Eppel, 2013, 2014). Most recently, we read Aprimadya (2025), who gave us a way to understand this implementation gap: not as an absence of anything, but as a presence, and not as a failure of obedience but as a site of meaning-making and action where the state is always earning its legitimacy, or not. Throughout, the theoretical thread has been Bevir and Rhodes (2003): and their insistence that we cannot understand public sector action without understanding the beliefs, traditions, and stories that shape it.

That foundation now makes something else visible: what I call the “interpretive hinge,” the institutional capability to connect policy advice to implementation through translation, trust-building, negotiation, and sense-making. Drawing on Jann and Wegrich’s (2024) Handbook of Public Policy Implementation and Capano, Craft and Howlett’s (2025) Handbook of Policy Advisory Systems, this series will trace how that hinge functions, or fails to function. Along the way, I’ll introduce you to more work by local academics and some kaupapa Māori researchers who have been making this very point for decades. Today, we start with the intellectual history that explains why we are where we are.

Harald Sætren’s mapping of implementation studies reveals three distinct generations of thinking. The First Generation in the 1970s took a top-down, rationalist view. Pressman and Wildavsky’s landmark study of a failed federal programme in Oakland discovered what they termed the “implementation gap”: the chasm between policy designed centrally and reality on the ground. Their generation saw implementation as linear, flowing from centre to periphery. Failure meant insufficient control. The solution lay in better design, clearer instructions, and tighter monitoring.

This provoked a fierce reaction. The Second Generation in the 1980s flipped the perspective entirely. Michael Lipsky’s Street-Level Bureaucracy argued that policy is not what is written in law, but what is enacted in the daily micro-decisions of teachers, nurses, police officers, and social workers. These frontline workers are not passive cogs but active agents using discretion to cope with impossible demands: overwhelming caseloads, contradictory rules, inadequate resources. An ED nurse deciding which patient to see first when the emergency department is gridlocked, a teacher adapting curriculum for a child with complex needs when there is no specialist support, a case manager signing off an emergency grant to a family without any food in the fridge: these are not deviations from policy but policy itself, made real through human judgement under pressure. The implementation gap was not a failure to fix but an inevitable response to systemic impossibility.

The Third Generation from the 1990s onward has attempted synthesis. These scholars developed hybrid models acknowledging that central actors set constraints through law, budgets, and institutional design, whilst local actors retain significant agency within those constraints. Implementation is neither pure top-down control nor bottom-up chaos, but continuous negotiation and adaptation. It is not a technical problem to solve but a political and social process to navigate.

This history holds an uncomfortable mirror to our own system. First-generation thinking remains the default operating model across much of he poneketanga. We see it in endless restructurings promising to “align” the system, in demands for centrally controlled operational settings, and in ministerial surprise when elegant plans collide with messy reality. The language that dominates announcements: “levers,” “drivers,” “machinery of government,” “roll-outs”: all of it betrays a belief that pulling the right lever with sufficient force will make the machine respond as designed.

Consider the infrastructure programmes analysed by the Auditor-General in 2023. Major investment decisions were made without sufficient information, projects were announced before proper scoping, and delivery agencies and construction experts were excluded from the conversations. The programmes suffered significant cost increases, delays, and cancellations. This is not simply poor execution. It reveals why first-generation thinking persists despite its failures: it preserves the illusion of ministerial control that our accountability system demands. Ministers are held accountable for outcomes they cannot directly control, delivered by people they have never met, in contexts they do not understand. Centralised, top-down approaches offer political cover even when everyone knows they will not work.

The pattern repeats across health, education, and social services. He poneketanga celebrates “empowered frontlines” whilst designing funding models and accountability systems that systematically disempower them. It acknowledges complexity whilst demanding simple logic models that fit on a single page. It talks about local context whilst creating standardised programmes that ignore regional economic drivers and community capabilities.

Some parts of the system have moved beyond this. Pockets of practice exist in the behavioural-insight policy shops, in the community-led development and commissioning teams, and amongst experienced policy professionals who understand the delivery models they advise on. But these remain exceptions, not the rule.

This intellectual lag has consequences. It wastes public money on reforms doomed to fail because they rest on outdated assumptions. It systematically undervalues the people and processes that actually make policy work. Most fundamentally, it prevents us from building public institutions humble enough to embrace complexity without abandoning rigour, to acknowledge uncertainty without abandoning responsibility, to remain open to learning without abandoning action.

Sætren’s fifty-year history teaches us that there are no simple answers to why policies fail or succeed. Implementation is messy, contextual, and often an inexplicable craft. The challenge now is finding ways to bridge the gap between what we know about implementation and how our system actually operates. That requires building the interpretive hinge: the institutional capacity to translate between the world of policy advice and the reality of delivery. Next month, we will examine the foundational tension that makes this so difficult: the irreconcilable conflict between the top-down view from Pōneke and the bottom-up reality of the frontline.

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.

Cairney, P. (2025). Why perfect policy coherence is unattainable (and may be ill-advised). Policy Sciences, 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11077-025-09582-9

Capano, G., Craft, J., & Howlett, M. (Eds.). (2025). Handbook of policy advisory systems. Edward Elgar Publishing.

Eppel, E. (2013). Collaborative governance case studies: The Land and Water Forum (Working Paper No. 13/05). Institute for Governance and Policy Studies, Victoria University of Wellington.

Eppel, E. (2014). Improving New Zealand water governance: Challenges and recommendations. Policy Quarterly, 10(3), 66–73.

Eppel, E., Turner, D., & Wolf, A. (2011). Complex policy implementation: The role of experimentation and learning. Policy Quarterly, 7(1), 45–54. https://doi.org/10.26686/pq.v7i1.4404

Gill, D. (2016). Regulatory coherence: The case of New Zealand. In D. Gill & P. Intal Jr. (Eds.), The development of regulatory management systems in East Asia: Country studies (pp. 175–227). ERIA.

Head, B. W. (2023). Reconsidering expertise for public policymaking: The challenges of contestability. Australian Journal of Public Administration, 83(2), 156–172.

Hoppen, M., Brandsen, T., & Honingh, M. (2025). Conditions for involving vulnerable citizens in co-production: The importance of commitment. Public Management Review. https://doi.org/10.1080/14719037.2025.2523953

Lipsky, M. (1980). Street-level bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the individual in public services. Russell Sage Foundation.

Office of the Auditor-General. (2023). Making infrastructure investment decisions quickly. Office of the Auditor-General.

Pressman, J. L., & Wildavsky, A. (1973). Implementation: How great expectations in Washington are dashed in Oakland. University of California Press.

Sætren, H. (2024). An intellectual history and state-of-the-art assessment of policy implementation research and theory. In S. Jann & F. Wegrich (Eds.), Handbook of public policy implementation (pp. 15–34). Edward Elgar Publishing.