Te Rā Whakamana: Situated Agency and the Art of Implementation

09/09/2025

I follow Aprimadya’s case study of Indonesian academics caught between teaching and research to show what situated agency looks like, and why we should listen for dilemmas rather than watch compliance dashboards.

This week’s Te Rā Whakamana continues to explore what fills the so-called implementation gap when, as Paul Cairney (2025) reminds us, perfect coherence is impossible. I have been developing the hypothesis that implementation does not fail because communities refuse to comply, and that it is better understood as constitutional meaning-making, a cycle in which communities interpret and reinterpret, contest, shape, and reshape delivery.

Muhammad Hali Aprimadya’s recent work (2025) gives us a framework for seeing this more clearly. In my last post I introduced his argument that the implementation gap is the space in which interpretation and consent are formed, rather than evidence of a breakdown. This week I turn to the case study that anchors his framework: Indonesian academics caught in a collision between their identity as teachers and the state’s new demands for research.

The strength of Aprimadya’s work is that it stays close to experience. His framework emerges from the lived experience of academics who found themselves under pressure to become something different, and their story shows the mechanics of implementation in real time: the dilemmas that arise when new policy challenges existing professional beliefs, and the situated agency that emerges in response.

In what follows I want to do three things. First, I trace how identity shaped Indonesian academics’ sense of themselves as teachers. Second, I follow how new research policies struck at the core of that identity. Third, I show how academics responded with the creativity and compromise that Aprimadya calls situated agency, before asking what this means for us in Aotearoa.

The story begins with identity. For generations, an Indonesian academic was understood to be a teacher, and Aprimadya’s (2024) research shows that this identity grew out of specific colonial arrangements. The Dutch colonial system established universities mainly to train civil servants and teachers for administrative purposes, and deliberately avoided research institutions that might encourage intellectual independence. These arrangements became embedded in law: academics were classified as “professional teachers” until 2006, and performance assessments gave priority to teaching over research output. The identity ran deep, shaping who academics understood themselves to be as well as what they did; as one academic put it, “since I was little, I have wanted to be a teacher” (Aprimadya, 2024, p. 13).

The state, in pursuit of global rankings and research metrics, then introduced what amounted to an assault on that colonial legacy and professional identity. Through document reviews, Aprimadya (2024) found “the proliferation of research-focused policies and regulations in the past two decades. Core to these regulatory transformations is the emphasis on publications and the incentivisation of research” (p. 12). The academic was to become something quite different, a producer of research.

Aprimadya (2025) calls the collision that followed a dilemma, and his definition cuts deeper than we might expect. Drawing on Bevir and Rhodes, he treats a dilemma as arising “when a new idea stands in opposition to existing beliefs or practices and so forces a reconsideration” (Bevir & Rhodes, 2003, p. 36). For these academics the change was an existential challenge to their personal standing, their professional identity, and their sense of what kind of knowledge mattered, far more than a new performance indicator.

The technocratic vision of the researcher was in direct conflict with an ingrained belief in being a teacher. One academic put it plainly: “I see teaching as above all others… If you want to research, do not join universities (but join) LIPI (Indonesian Institute of Sciences)” (Aprimadya, 2024, p. 13). I read this as a line drawn between two professional worlds rather than a matter of preference.

This is the kind of friction that policies designed by He Pōneketanga for He Pōneketanga tend not to anticipate. The interpretive work in Aprimadya’s case study is the work operational policy advisers once did, in the old public administration era before new public management separated policy from delivery. They were the people inside agencies who knew their delivery models intimately, who could translate broad ministerial direction into operational policy, and who did so in ways that still left frontline staff and communities room to interpret, reinterpret, and reshape. That interpretive hinge is now largely missing, and ministers deprived of it tend to resort to micromanagement: detailed operational policies, prescriptive guidance, and endless, sometimes irrelevant, process measures and controls.

No amount of central specification can resolve these dilemmas, because they arise from a collision of meanings rather than from insufficient detail. When policy asks people to contradict their professional identity, and being a good academic requires abandoning what academics believe makes them good, technical fixes miss the underlying issue.

Implementation works when meaning is continually negotiated by people who keep both policy intent and delivery reality in view.

What I find remarkable about this case study is how the academics responded to so deep a challenge. They neither complied nor resisted outright, a binary far too crude to capture what happened, and instead showed what Aprimadya (2025) calls situated agency.

The concept goes to the heart of how implementation works. Agency refers to the capacity to choose, to act creatively, and to exercise autonomy, and it is always situated because those choices are constrained and enabled by a specific context (Bevir & Rhodes, 2003). Agency in this sense is what you can make work within the system you have inherited, with the resources you can reach and the relationships you can call on, rather than an abstract freedom.

Aprimadya’s (2024) research shows three patterns of response.

The first academic, facing a wholly inadequate domestic research infrastructure, developed an elegant solution: “So, my research is divided into two. (First), applied research, which is about what society needs from our discipline… Another one is research that I consider as futuristic (or) basic science… The limitations (on infrastructure in Indonesia) enable me to collaborate with others. So, my access is to South Korea” (p. 13). This academic located their agency in international experience and personal relationships, which allowed them to meet the new research demands while keeping faith with deeper professional commitments.

The second academic encountered what Aprimadya (2025), following Boswell et al. (2019), terms a mundane dilemma. They had created something of real value, a research community for young academics working outside Java, but as they explained: “When we establish a community (and) create facilitation for young researchers from institutions outside Java, it is not recorded in the systems… It is, in my view and maybe could be confirmed with those young academics, very valuable… But it is not tangible; so there is no scoring” (Aprimadya, 2024, p. 13). Faced with a choice between officially recognised but potentially hollow work and meaningful but invisible work, they chose to keep building communities for young academics, whether or not the work found its way into the official system.

The third academic, frustrated by bureaucratic research funding, turned towards consultancy: “Research is time-bound, and sometimes we do not get (any funding). I have not received any approval for research (funding) this year… But consultancy (work) with the government is not time-bound. For instance, earlier this year, there was an offer to ‘please help develop eco-fishing port’” (Aprimadya, 2024, p. 14). This academic did not abandon research; they found a way around the institutional failures to do work that was intellectually satisfying and socially useful.

These responses say something important about the mechanics of implementation. The academics were not simply following or fighting rules, and they did not create a shadow or guerrilla administration; they were engaged in careful sense-making, reworking their professional practice to keep some integrity while meeting new institutional demands.

What, then, does the Indonesian experience teach us about our own system? Aprimadya’s case is specific in its cultural and institutional detail, but it provides evidence about implementation that should change how we approach policy analysis. If we want to understand why a policy is stalling or producing unexpected results, we need to spend less time on compliance dashboards and more time listening for the dilemmas.

That means asking where the friction is showing. Is a health directive from the centre colliding with a clinician’s duty of care to particular patients? Is a digital-first strategy cutting across a public servant’s commitment to serving offline communities? Is an environmental standard experienced as an existential threat by farming families whose identity is tied to particular ways of working the land? Is a new building and construction standard at odds with the emerging evidence on climate change?

Once we begin looking for these patterns, they tend to appear everywhere. We have been trained to treat such tensions as problems for better change management, whereas Aprimadya’s (2025) research suggests they are part of the system itself: the places where meaning is negotiated, consent is earned or lost, and legitimacy is formed.

This sits close to our constitutional context. Te Tiriti o Waitangi has never been a blueprint or a command; its authority lies in constant interpretation, as Crown policies are pushed back on, reshaped, and legitimised through practice. Labelling that as failure misses where legitimacy is earned, which is in delivery, where the Crown’s obligations and community authority meet and must be negotiated.

By documenting dilemmas and situated agency, Aprimadya’s (2025) research gives a more respectful and, I think, more effective way of understanding the people who do the work of implementation. Rather than seeing frontline responses as either obstruction or success, we begin to recognise the creativity and moral reasoning that turning policy into practice requires.

Recognising these dynamics is one thing, and having a method for uncovering and understanding them systematically is another. Next week I will examine Aprimadya’s decentred analysis, a technique that shifts attention from institutions and structures to “the contingent beliefs and actions of individuals,” and that researchers, analysts, and leaders can use to understand what is happening in their own organisations.

References

Aprimadya, M. H. (2024). Navigating ideational dynamics: Actor-policy interactions in the implementation of Indonesia’s higher education reform [Doctoral dissertation, Australian National University].

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.

Cairney, P. (2025). Why perfect policy coherence is unattainable (and may be ill-advised). Policy Sciences, 58(3), 619–642. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11077-025-09582-9