Dw Adams

Knowing and Skilling in Contemporary Public Administration

The knowledge bases of public administration are changing and so are the relations within which government decision-making takes place. This is particularly so for governments which took the high road to reform in the 1980s and are now seeking new ways of meeting public demands for better services. The discrediting of some aspects of the neo-liberal policy agendas and the new public management prescriptions has created uncertainty. Both traditional bureaucratic and economically rational reference points have been thrown into doubt. The resultant search for new sources of knowledge appropriate to contemporary government has brought a (re)new(ed) interest in networks. This article looks at the connections between knowledge and networks in government and asks whether this creates a case for a new public administration involving a new set of skills for public administrators and new ways of organising their work.

Social Innovation and Why it has Policy Significance

Academic discussion of social challenges and the government interventions which might address them are overlooking social innovation as an option. Contemporary trends at the community-public management interface, however, show an upsurge of interest in social innovation as a way of simultaneously creating social benefit and economic opportunity. While this indicates that the idea has genuine substance our observation of international and Australian developments convinces us that there is now sufficient experience upon which to base an understanding of what social innovation is and why it has policy significance. In this article we identify some components of social innovation practice and indicate how these might be theorised into generally applicable models.

Learning about Learning: Discovering the Work of Policy

The development of policy rests on skilled practice by knowledgeable practitioners – ‘policy work’ – and it is important to know what skills and knowledge this work calls upon, and where these are learned. Although there is substantial academic knowledge and courses in this field, many practitioners will argue that policy work is ‘as much an art as a science’ and is something that ‘you learn as you go’. This article reports on an exploratory study of policy practitioners’ accounts of their practice, what counts as knowledge, and in what contexts it is ‘useful’. We examine the discourses through which policy work is accomplished, the way in which people learn to do it, and the place of academic work in the constitution of these discourses. Drawing on our respondents understanding of policy practice, we discuss what more might be done to facilitate learning about the work of policy.

Alternatives to Competitive Tendering and Privatisation: A Case Study from the Australian Health Industry

The international trend towards economic and financial management reforms is well documented with most governments now being involved in public sector restructuring programs, which have at their core the aim of improving the quality of administrative functions through a more responsive approach by state agencies (OECD 1996). In nations with administrative systems derived from British models these efforts may be generally referred to as ‘the de-Sir Humphreying of the Westminister model’ (Hood 1990:105). In essence this approach has had three aims. First, it has attempted to diminish the role of thestate and make the bureaucracy more responsive to political leaders. Second, it has aimed for greater efficiency through the use of private sector management techniques. Third, it has focused on the citizen as a customer and service recipient (Aucoin 1990:16).

Public sector reform and the public interest in Australia

Contemporary public sector reforms in Australia have been dominated by efficiency, productivity and contestability considerations captured in the National Competition Policy (NCP). Both in the reform process in general and in the NCP processes in particular, the lack of priority attributed to non‐economic concerns such as co‐ordination, equity, representation, political accountability, consultation and distributive outcomes has been a serious omission. The idea of public interest, once central to democratic public administration, has re‐emerged to challenge the perceived excesses of economic rationalism as the unifying idea of reform. In this article it is argued that substantive situational manifestations of public interest can be used to complement rather than undermine the efficiency, productivity and contestability objectives of public sector reform.

Operationalising place‐based innovation in public administration

Purpose – Place‐based innovation has become central to meeting the complex demands on contemporary public administration. Among the difficulties in introducing new practices is the gap between political authorisation and administrative implementation. This paper aims to use the emergence of new forms of place‐based public administration involved in the (re)introduction of community‐based ideas, practices and instruments into public administration to demonstrate how authorising and operationalising innovation can be addressed in practice.Design/methodology/approach – The paper reviews placed‐based public administration initiatives in Victoria, Australia over a decade.Findings – To be effective public sector innovations need both a powerful authorising environment and also a framework for operationalisation. As with private sector innovation new ideas in the public sector often need new institutional arrangements and instruments to enable their effective take up and diffusion. These new arrangements often r...