Te Rā Whakamana: The View from the Top versus The View from the Ground

16/12/2025

Last month, we traced fifty years of implementation scholarship and discovered that our public sector remains intellectually trapped in the assumptions of the 1970s. The purpose of today’s post is to examine the foundational fault line that explains why.

Imagine you are the Prime Minister. You are standing on the ninth floor of the Beehive and looking over to Bowen Street and The Terrace. You see all the buildings where the policy advisory systems are designed. You find yourself suddenly irritated, recalling a briefing from yesterday: your officials telling you the policy advisory systems are controllable, with clear lines of authority, formal accountability relationships, statements of performance expectation, and ministers who possess the constitutional power to direct the machinery of government. But your instinct is that they are not. You’ve recently been to a Work and Income office in South Auckland and a rural health clinic in North Canterbury, and you’ve seen something entirely different: a world of impossible trade-offs, ambiguous rules, and frontline workers using their judgment and creativity to solve problems that neither the Cabinet Office Manual nor any policy manual could ever have anticipated. These are not merely different perspectives; they are fundamentally incompatible worldviews about what public policy is and how it works. The top-down view sees policy as a set of instructions to be followed; the bottom-up view sees it as a problem to be solved. This tension cannot be resolved; it can only be navigated. And in Aotearoa, the presence of Te Tiriti o Waitangi means our version of this debate carries a constitutional dimension that the international literature has barely begun to address.

The Battle Lines

In their article, Aron Buzogány and Helga Pülzl (2024) provide a clear-eyed assessment of the two dominant perspectives that have shaped implementation research for decades. They frame it as a clash of starting points: where you begin your analysis, at the centre or at the periphery, fundamentally determines what you see, what you value, and what solutions you propose. This is not simply a methodological choice; it reflects deeper assumptions about the nature of governance, the role of expertise, and the sources of democratic legitimacy.

The top-down perspective starts with the authoritative decision made by central government actors: the minister’s press release, a cabinet decision, or a legislative mandate. It views implementation as a hierarchical process, a chain of command flowing from the political centre down through the bureaucratic machinery to the frontline. The primary concern is control and fidelity to political goals. Success, from this viewpoint, is measured by compliance: did the implementing actors do what the law or the policy instructed them to do? Any deviation from the original intent is, by definition, a form of failure: in Aotearoa, we can sum them up as evidence of poor coordination, inadequate oversight, or insufficient political will and focus. This perspective privileges the view from the centre and assumes that the main challenge is ensuring the machine functions as designed.

In direct opposition, the bottom-up perspective argues that the only way to understand implementation is to start at the end of the chain, with the street-level bureaucrats and the target groups they interact with. This approach, pioneered by scholars like Michael Lipsky (1980), analyses the world from the point of view of the teacher in the classroom, the social worker conducting home visits, or the police officer on the beat. It focuses on the agency, goals, strategies, and networks of local actors, recognising that they operate in complex environments with multiple, often conflicting demands. Implementation is not a chain of command but a series of negotiations and adaptations. Success is measured not by compliance with rigid rules, but by the ability to solve problems on the ground, to respond to local needs, and to achieve meaningful outcomes for the people being served.

Buzogány and Pülzl’s core argument is that, while the field has since moved towards more complex “hybrid” theories that attempt to combine the two perspectives, this fundamental tension remains the most important organising principle for understanding implementation. The question is not which perspective is correct, but how to manage the creative tension between them.

Two Cases, Two Logics

In Aotearoa, this theoretical tension is not an abstract academic debate; it is a lived, daily reality. Consider two contrasting examples.

The Treasury’s Living Standards Framework, launched with considerable fanfare as a way to move beyond narrow economic indicators and embrace a more holistic view of wellbeing (Treasury, 2019), represents a classic top-down instrument. The LSF is elegant, comprehensive, and entirely conceived from the centre. The theory holds that if all agencies orient themselves to the same framework and measure and report against the same outcomes, better policy coordination will follow. It represents the apotheosis of first-generation thinking: rational, systematic, and designed to eliminate the messiness of competing priorities and local variation.

Yet in my experience observing its early implementation, the LSF reveals precisely the problems that bottom-up theorists would predict. Frontline agencies struggle to translate abstract well-being domains into concrete operational guidance. The framework sits at a level that is too high to inform day-to-day decision-making, yet too prescriptive to accommodate the specific local contexts that different front-line officials face. Social workers cannot easily translate “social cohesion” into case management decisions; teachers cannot readily connect “human capability” to classroom practice. The result, one suspects, is often performative compliance: where agencies learning to speak the language of the LSF in reporting documents whilst continuing to operate according to their own professional logics and institutional imperatives.

In stark contrast, the Māori Communities COVID-19 Fund represents a triumph of the bottom-up approach (Te Kawa & MacDonald, 2023). Designed and established by Te Puni Kōkiri in response to the pandemic, the MCCF succeeded precisely because it abandoned the top-down impulse characterising most government programmes. Instead of prescriptive rules, detailed application processes, or standardised reporting requirements, it devolved significant trust, resources, and discretion to Iwi, Hapū, Māori and community providers. The fund recognised that these organisations understood their communities and the specific challenges they faced better than anyone in Wellington. It trusted them to identify priorities, design solutions, and deliver results in ways that made sense in their local contexts.

The MCCF did not demand compliance with a predetermined template; it enabled problem-solving. It was a structure for outcomes: not more paperwork. The result was remarkable diversity: some organisations focused on food security, others on digital connectivity, still others on mental health support or educational resources. What united them was not a common approach but a common commitment to protecting their communities during a crisis and ensuring everyone had information about vaccine efficacy to help them decide whether to get their whānau vaccinated. The fund’s success lay not in its capacity to control what happened locally, but in its ability to enable local actors to respond creatively and effectively to local needs.

This comparison reveals something important about our system’s default settings. While we pay lip service to empowering the frontline, celebrating concepts like subsidiarity and devolution, our most powerful institutions and our deepest instincts remain profoundly top-down. The Treasury’s influence through Budget processes, the Public Service Commission’s emphasis on standardised capability frameworks, and the Auditor-General’s focus on compliance and consistency all reinforce a top-down logic. We have built a system structurally biased towards control and coherence, even when we intellectually recognise the value of local discretion and adaptation. I am not criticising; I am observing.

The Constitutional Dimension

Here, however, we encounter something the international literature cannot help us with. The classic top-down/bottom-up debate implicitly assumes that the “bottom” consists of public servants or state-funded agencies operating within a clear hierarchy. The street-level bureaucrat exercises discretion, certainly, but does so as an agent of the state, deriving authority from the same constitutional source as the minister who sits atop the chain. The debate, for all its sophistication, takes place entirely within the frame of a single sovereign order.

But what happens when the “bottom” is not merely a delivery agent, but a partner with its own source of constitutional legitimacy?

The various institutions that make up Te Ao Māori and the Māori economy are not simply another set of stakeholders, nor are they simple article three entities. However, when they are, they are often the more effective ones to celebrate and replicate. Instead, they are constitutional partners with their own authority, governance structures, and relationships with their people: relationships that predate the “New Zealand” state and do not derive from it. When the MCCF devolved resources to Te Ao institutions, it was not merely exercising good bottom-up practice in the Lipskyan sense. It was, whether consciously or not, enacting a different constitutional logic altogether: one in which the Crown recognised that it did not possess a monopoly on legitimate authority within this polity. Frankly, the podium spoke to a much narrower group than we are willing to accept: for now.

This raises a critical question that the implementation literature, conceived as it was in the context of unitary European states and American federalism, is ill-equipped to answer. Does the bottom-up perspective, with its focus on the agency of local actors, go far enough? Or do we require a framework that moves beyond implementation altogether: one that speaks not of discretion but of co-production, not of devolution but of partnership, not of a single hierarchy with flexible endpoints but of genuinely shared authority between two different sources of legitimacy? The proposals regarding local government raise these precise questions.

The language of “bottom-up,” for all its utility, may still inadvertently reinscribe a hierarchy that is constitutionally inappropriate in a nation founded on Te Tiriti. To speak of Iwi me Hapū as the “bottom” of an implementation chain is to miss the point entirely. They are not at the bottom of the Crown’s hierarchy; they stand beside it, or ought to, as parties to a constitutional compact. We may need new concepts, or perhaps very old ones, recovered and renewed, that can accommodate not merely the discretion of street-level bureaucrats, but the rangatiratanga exercised by all of the Te Ao institutions. However, I will argue later this month with clearer lanes for article two and article three entities.

This is not to suggest that the top-down/bottom-up framework lacks utility in Aotearoa. It remains essential for understanding the internal dynamics of the public service, the tensions between Pōnke and the regions, and the persistent gap between policy intent and operational reality. But it is insufficient. Any account of implementation in this country that does not grapple with Te Tiriti is, at best, incomplete; at worst, it reproduces the very constitutional blindness that has characterised Crown policy-making for generations.

The Interpretive Hinge

The perpetual tension between top-down and bottom-up views defines the space where the “interpretive hinge” must operate. This hinge is not about choosing a side; it is about developing the institutional capacity to manage the creative tension between these worldviews whilst remaining alert to the constitutional questions that surround them. It requires the difficult craft of translating between the strategic intent of the centre and the operational reality of the frontline, feeding intelligence from the periphery back to the centre in ways that can inform and improve central decision-making, and doing all of this within a constitutional framework that the standard theories were never designed to comprehend.

Next month, we turn to the people who live permanently on that hinge, navigating this tension every day: the street-level bureaucrats who are not merely implementing policy, but actively creating it.

References

Buzogány, A., & Pülzl, H. (2024). Top-down and bottom-up implementation. In S. Jann & F. Wegrich (Eds.), Handbook of public policy implementation (pp. 156–172). Edward Elgar Publishing.

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

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

Treasury. (2019). The Living Standards Framework 2019. New Zealand Treasury.