Researching public policy and public administration: are Australian academics on the right track?

As academics, we don’t often acknowledge that the phenomena we choose to study and the way we go about the task represent the results of processes of academic agenda-formation. In the social sciences, where ‘frontiers’ for research are more difficult to define than in the natural sciences, these processes are likely to be of particular significance.

Moreover, for those of us who write and research in public policy and public administration, I believe it is particularly important to tease out the implications of the relationships between knowledge and context, because they affect (in both positive and negative ways) the productiveness and incisiveness of Australian-based public policy analysis. I want to suggest that Australian-based researchers are in danger of losing their way, and that the current preoccupations of research-funding agencies and of universities are making the problem worse.

The argument

Point one: the origins of academic agendas

Our ways of knowing, and of generating and validating knowledge in the study of public policy and public management, are derived largely from the inductive study of specific systems.  These theories (or models, frameworks or lenses) are, to a considerable extent, specific to the study of the national systems in which they originated.  Because most scholars in the English-speaking world work in the UK or the US, it is the analysis of these systems that predominates.

This should not be a surprise, and if the ambit of these models were routinely subjected to critical scrutiny from outside their countries of origin, there would be less likelihood of their being used inappropriately.  But this is not the case. While work in comparative public policy and public administration shows how little generalisability there is, the models themselves continue on, apparently unscathed. They remain centerpieces of every literature review, regardless of where the research is carried out, unless and until they are superseded by newer versions.

In fact, the older models are not so much disproved, as bypassed. Thus academic agendas change over time – because the world changes, and because there is a premium on being the person to come up with the ‘viral meme’: the concept that catches on. But whether concepts are new or not, it is important to remind ourselves of the limitations of knowledge in our fields, or to put the case more positively, to celebrate the fact that our first duty is to understand and explain the systems we know the most about.

Point two: the implications of academic agendas

It might be argued that, even if models are not generalisable, this should not be a cause for concern, because scholars will choose which to use and which not to use, to suit their purpose. However I will argue that this is not the case.  Whether you work in Sardinia or Sydney, if you write about administrative reform/change/development, you have to write about (or at least pay your respects to) ‘new public management’ – or its more recent forms such as ‘new public governance’.

If you are interested in public policy processes, you will need to discuss, or look for, one or other of networks, path dependence, policy windows, or even punctuated equilibria. In earlier times, you would have discussed public choice theory or institutionalism or the advocacy coalition framework.  And before that, neo Marxian or post-structuralist interpretations.

Sometimes these approaches will be illuminating, other times not. But it seems highly probable that there will be distortions in the way research is done in the non-hegemonic countries. To the extent that they use theory explicitly, Australian and New Zealand scholars will be grappling with ways of applying these frameworks which, very often, simply do not fit the situations they are observing. More concerningly, they may miss phenomena in their own polities because they are so keen to follow-up on leads from the international literature.

To illustrate, let me give an example of this phenomenon one drawn from the study of public administration:  ‘new public management’ from the United Kingdom.

Academic agenda example: ‘New public management’

Firstly, what exactlyis ‘new public management’? By this I mean, not ‘what is the content of new public management’, but ‘what is its status as a tool or technique’? It is not a model or a theory in the sense that it tells us why things might be happening – its intent is descriptive, rather than explanatory. Perhaps we could say that new public management (NPM) is a framework which posits something important about administrative reform as a social process, which works its way out in different contexts – a paradigm, in other words (Stewart 2009, ch 7). Maybe, too, it is a kind of ontology, in a sub-discipline (public administration) that struggles to locate itself convincingly in the world of management research.

From the perspective of what scholars choose to write about, though, we can certainly say that NPM is an agenda: a way of focusing attention. For more than two decades, the academic agenda in the study of public management has been dominated by this approach, and by the concerns associated with it –privatization, outsourcing etc.

The impact has been particularly strong in writing about public administration in Australia, where Candler found a strong ‘paradigmatic’ influence (see Candler 2008). The effect was less strong in studies of Canadian public administration. Brazil, Candler’s third example, showed very little effect: Brazilian scholars continued to follow a Marxian path of analysis.

It might be argued, with these differences in mind, that scholars were always aware of the extent to which UK-related concepts (such as ‘agencification’) could or should be discussed, and cherry-picked the NPM menu. However, careful research has shown quite different ‘trajectories’ in each country, even those belonging to the Anglo-world (Pollitt and Bouckaerdt 2000). This should tell us, or should have told us, that ‘new public management’ is simply shorthand for change in each country.

The real point about an agenda is not so much what is included in it, but what has been excluded. What have we missed as a result of the focus on NPM? Speaking for Australia, I would say: a great deal. We have missed what has not changed: the supremacy of the bureaucratic form. We have also missed what may have been most distinctive about the Australian trajectory: the assertion of political control, and the erosion of a public service that believed in itself, and managed itself: in many ways the antithesis of what new public management was meant to be about. Practitioners writing in the academic literature (Podger 2006; Shergold 2007) tackled some of these subjects but academics, by and large, did not: perhaps indicating a growing divide between the worlds of practice and of theory.

So, what should Australian-based scholars be doing?

This paper has, deliberately, set out to attack some sacred cows, particularly the belief that public policy/administration models and frameworks are inherently generalisable (as implied by the usual practice of referencing models drawn from the international literature).  But the more important point is the limiting impact that these approaches have had on the way Australian scholars have worked. Consequently, there is some ground to make up in the study of Australian phenomena. In the interests of connecting the argument with some practical recommendations, I would advocate that we:

-generate more theory from Australian circumstances  - ie inductive empirical (‘grounded’) theory based on qualitative/quantitative methods.

- be more critical of theories/models/frameworks drawn from the American and British literature. When adopting an approach, perhaps consider those that are broad enough to travel well (such as institutionalism in its more flexible forms);

- study the generality of Australian experience rather than the exceptions: for example, many of us have been attracted to the study of networks, because there has been so much international interest in these phenomena – but they may be less important in the Australian context than elsewhere;

- take more of a lead from practice ie what is actually happening in public agencies (although this is easier said than done, as the Australian national and state bureaucratic systems are incredibly secretive).

- consider explicitly phenomenological approaches eg RFI Smith’s paper on public value, which takes the idea behind the theory, rather than the theory itself, in order to adapt it to Australian situation (Smith 2004).

In thinking more critically about the Australian research agenda, it will be necessary to consider carefully the pressure from the ARC and from individual universities, to publish in A* international journals (invariably from the US and the UK). Using Australian examples or cases, so necessary in understanding the reality of these practice-oriented disciplines, may be frowned upon by international journal editors.

In conclusion

The primary duty of scholars in practice-oriented subjects such as public policy and public administration, is to understand what is happening around us. I have argued that, insofar as our efforts have been theoretically orientated, they have fallen short, because we have been trying to apply models drawn inductively from other systems, to our own. Consequently, there is a big gap between the theoretical apparatus we try to apply, and what researchers in Australia (as well as others from countries outside the UK and the US) actually write about. We tend to look for problems in the wrong place, or write accounts of existing practice that are too descriptive to be of much use, either as explanation or prescription. The result is a frustrating irrelevance for those working from a base in political science, and a dominance, in the real world of practice, of the market-related preoccupations of economic analysis. These have their place, of course, but the study of public policy and public administration, by those who should be experts in the field, needs to be better-balanced.