Te Rā Whakamana: The Coherence Paradox

19/08/2025

Today, we turn to Paul Cairney’s (2025) provocation that perfect policy coherence is not only unattainable but may in fact be counterproductive. Cairney reminds us that the gap between ideal and reality is not a mistake but a permanent feature of governance, and sometimes even a strength. Te Rā Whakamana is a regular series that examines what happens after policy is announced. It highlights peer-reviewed research and writing that gives us insight into the slow, often invisible work of delivery, where systems either hold or fracture, and where legitimacy is earned (or lost) in context.

Look around: too many policy advisory tools still begin from the fantasy that policy is a box to be packed neatly and closed tight, with priorities stacked and racked, funding instruments aligned, capability ready, willing and able, and coherence sealed in.

Tools like this are useful only as starting points. They are useful devices to force officials and ministers to think harder about what they are trying to achieve, to expose tensions, and to confront the trade-offs that public sector delivery demands.

But they are not end points. Treating them as if they resolve complexity and make a good idea ready for delivery is a category one mistake. As I have been arguing in this series, what looks tidy on the page rarely survives contact with the contested, relational, and often messy reality of front-line practice. Announceables are not the same as delivery.

Paul Cairney’s (2025) latest provocation is aimed squarely at this obsession with coherence in advisory systems. He uses an ideal type to show what “perfect policy advisory coherence” would demand: priorities aligned from Cabinet down, evidence integrated across agencies, advice consistent at every turn, and the machinery of government singing from the same score.

Then he carefully punctures the illusion. The coherence gap, specifically the gulf between aspiration and reality, is not a failure but a permanent condition of governing. Silos exist for good reasons: to hold expertise and relationships, and to ensure accountability. Conflicts over goals are not distractions; they are the substance of politics. And discretion at the edges will never be eradicated by central strategy. In this framing, chasing coherence across policy advisory systems is not only impossible, it risks making things worse (Cairney, 2025).

But if advisory coherence is a mirage, what actually holds systems together in practice? Here is where the empirical evidence from the Performance Improvement Framework (PIF) becomes instructive.

Over 53 agency reviews, a consistent picture emerges: performance is not random, nor is it explained away by resources or rhetoric. What matters is internal outcome coherence: the alignment between strategy, outcomes, leadership, financial management, and the operating and delivery models. This internal coherence is what drives results.

The correlations tell a compelling story. Strategy and effectiveness are significantly linked (a correlation of 0.449*), and this relationship persists even when we account for financial resources. Similarly, efficiency and effectiveness go hand in hand (correlation of 0.504), a relationship that holds even when leadership effects are removed. Leadership shapes strategy directly and strongly (correlation of 0.578*), not merely through operational channels. Financial management drives efficiency (correlation of 0.508*), whilst service quality independently enhances efficiency (correlation of 0.475*). These aren’t mere statistical artefacts: they represent real patterns in how high-performing agencies operate. When strategy and institutional capability align, performance strengthens systematically.

Which brings us to the telling case of the Land and Water Forum. Established in 2009 under Minister Nick Smith, it assembled nearly 60 stakeholders from across farming, iwi, science, industry, and environmental groups: not a token consultation but a structured ecosystem of advisory coherence.

Independent chair Alistair Bisley forced adversaries to face each other directly. Over its active period, the Forum produced more than 150 recommendations, building what Elizabeth Eppel (2013) called a form of collaborative governance that removes the middleman and puts the onus of finding a way through complexity on the stakeholders themselves. It was advisory coherence at scale, designed and hard-won through repeated negotiation.

And yet it failed at the wall of implementation. Fewer than half the recommendations were taken up (Cheyne, 2017). Those that were adopted often lacked traction because the delivery system had been left outside the room. Regional councils, compliance officers, and community organisations: the actors expected to give effect to new water management regimes had not been part of the design. Also, as I am advised by readers the Government cherry-picked consensus outputs, undermining legitimacy of the process with key stakeholders deciding to walk away.

The advisory ecosystem was coherent, but it was disconnected from the delivery system. Without that connection, coherence evaporated on contact with practice.

This is the crux.

Cairney shows us that perfect advisory coherence is an illusion. The PIF evidence demonstrates that coherence within outcome systems, linking strategy and outcomes to leadership, finance, efficiency, and service delivery, is what actually drives performance. The Land and Water Forum reveals that coherence in advice, without coherence with delivery, collapses. Advisory systems can be as sophisticated as you like, but unless they are joined to capacity and ownership in practice, they remain brittle.

The lesson is not to abandon coherence, but to redefine it.

This matters particularly for elected officials. Accepting that perfect policy coherence is impossible doesn’t mean the authorising environement is off the hook: in fact, quite the opposite.

The task of the authorising environment must shift from imposing uniformity to something more sophisticated: curating coherence where it counts.

This means providing narrative coherence (a clear story about direction), granting coherence of permission (explicitly authorising variation in approach), and maintaining coherence of accountability (clarity about outcomes whilst allowing flexibility in means).

Most critically, elected officials must resist the temptation to create incoherence through contradictory directives or by cherry-picking advice. Even the most capable officials cannot compensate for ministers who actively undermine systemic alignment.

What effective ministers do, in practice, is champion what I’m calling “practical outcome coherence”. The alignment that emerges when strategy meets delivery, when advice connects with ownership, and when this connection is robust enough to hold under pressure. These ministers ensure delivery agents are in the room from day one, asking not merely “what should we do?” but “what can we actually make work?” The Land and Water Forum failed precisely because the authorising environment did not have the discipline needed: the fact that stakeholders reached agreement in isolation from those who would have to implement it, is not a problem for the stakeholders.

Advisory coherence in itself is not enough. Practical outcome coherence goes further. This isn’t simply about implementation or delivery; it’s about creating systems where the capacity to advise and the capacity to act are woven together from the start, where those who must deliver are part of shaping what they’ll deliver.

Pragmatism may glue things together temporarily, as Palmer (2007) argued, but the practical state requires something more deliberate: advisory ecosystems wired into implementation systems, where legitimacy is earned in practice, not assumed at the centre. Ministers are not short of blueprints; what they are hungry for, as my PhD has found, is free and frank advice that tells them whether those blueprints can hold when they hit the ground.

Thus the quest is not to eliminate fragmentation or force advisory systems into artificial unity. The real work is to join advice and delivery, and to do it in ways that hold trust, context, and ownership together. Because coherence that lives only on paper is not coherence at all.

Footnotes

*Click here for more information on the analysis

References

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

Cheyne, C. (2017). Can collaboration trump adversarial environmental planning? Insights from New Zealand’s Land and Water Forum and proposed statutory collaborative planning process. Paper presented at International Conference on Public Policy, Panel T02P09, Collaborative Governance and Deliberative Policymaking in Comparative Perspective, 28 June 2017.

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

Palmer, M. (2007). New Zealand’s Constitutional Culture. New Zealand Universities Law Review, 22, 565–597.