IPS Publications

Local Government Strategic Planning in Theory and Practice

2012-01-09T14:51:01Z

Local Government Strategic Planning in Theory and Practice is the second and final monograph of the Local Futures Research Project, a study of strategic policy and planning in local government, funded by the Foundation for Research, Science and Technology and based at the School of Government, Victoria University of Wellington. The book describes and analyses the experiences of a sample of local and regional councils as they worked with their communities to prepare Long-Term Council Community Plans under the Local Government Act 2002.

The authors critique the design and implementation of community strategic planning under the Act with a focus on the relationship between theory and practice. They also consider the implications of recent amendments to local government legislation, including the creation of the Auckland Council and modifications to strategic planning and management requirements.

Local Government Strategic Planning in Theory and Practice is a valuable resource for anyone interested in strategic planning, local government and governance, and the interrelationships between councils and communities, central government and the private and community sectors.

IPS WP11/11 - Report on Representation and Development of Women for Top Leadership Roles in the New Zealand Public Service

2011-12-13T15:33:57Z

New Zealand has an enviable international reputation as a country where it is relatively common for women to hold top leadership roles in government and in organisations. Of 36 OECD countries, in 2003 New Zealand had the 4th highest representation of women in senior management with 31% of such positions held by women. However, by 2009 New Zealand had slipped to 17th position with 27%[1] representation.

The New Zealand Public Service in particular has traditionally had higher representation levels of women in senior management with 34% in 2001 climbing to a new high 40% in 2010. The proportion of women in public service [2]chief executive roles averaged 23% per year for the years 2001 to 2006. However, it has declined from a high of 26% (9 out of 35) in 2005 to 14% (5 out of 35) in late 2010.

This paper focuses on appointments to CE positions in the New Zealand Public Service and in particular it examines:

- the extent to which women are applying for, being shortlisted for and being appointed to Public Service chief executive positions over the last decade

- the extent to which women are represented in the potential pool for CE appointments and the previous roles of CE appointees

- what can be done to increase the number of women who apply for and are appointed to Public Service chief executive positions.

Policy Quarterly Volume 7 Number 4

2011-11-10T15:10:24Z

The 1992 Local Agenda 21 adopted at the Rio de Janeiro conference - the United Nations Conference on Environmentand Development - required governments to adopt and implement National Strategies for Sustainable Development. These were meant to offer guidance for the subsequent re-design of their economic and social governance systems basedon a set of four key governance principles for sustainability. The new governance systems were expected to facilitate the coordination of policies and strategies acrossthe three pillars of sustainability – social, environmental and economic, as well as the coordination of such policies acrossgovernmental levels. Two other key governance principles require the incorporation of intergenerational perspectivesand interests into policy-making, and the involvement of citizens and wide range of stakeholders into governanceprocesses, especially decision-making and implementation.

The question that this special issue of Policy Quarterly raises is – to what extent do we see evidence of theincorporation of such principles in the governance of key economic sectors and natural resources? Four contributionsto this issue provide insights by exploring successes and failures, threats and opportunities in two policy domains:tourism development and the management of freshwater resources. Two contributions are from Europe, and two from New Zealand; they explore key intercontinental differences and similarities.

De Boer and colleagues explore the implementation challenges associated with sustainable freshwatermanagement in the Netherlands. In the Dutch context this requires the coordination of interventions in four relevantpolicy domains: recreation, agriculture, nature and flood management. Their case study shows how an inclusivegovernance approach, with wide public and stakeholder participation, improves sustainability outcomes. In addition,an adaptive approach to implementation is crucial: they reveal that governance for sustainability implies finding theright balance between central government leadership and local flexibility to adapt to the complexities and uncertaintiesemerging in various local contexts. But adaptive implementation requires flexible institutions and ‘openended’regulatory structures that enable revisions in the light of learning and new facts. Moreover, it requires an allowancefor policy process phases to interact, rather than conceiving them as linear.

The importance of more integration of policy processes, particularly design and implementation, is also discussed inthe New Zealand context of water management by Fenemor and colleagues. An interactive approach to policymaking isrecommended by the surveyed freshwater stakeholders, as one of the 14 attributes of good governance distilled in theirpaper. The authors discuss how ‘techno-corporatist legal formalism’ dominating New Zealand’s freshwater governancefor decades has resulted in water permits and contracts that fix inefficient and inequitable water allocation systemsfor the long term. The surveyed stakeholders also associate good governance with a holistic approach to planning thatintegrates a wide diversity of values in water management such as landscape, ecological, cultural, and amenity values.

The recent formation of the Land and Water Forum suggests a political willingness to experiment with new governancearrangements based on the participatory principle. There are also signs of regulatory innovations and improvedcoordination across governmental levels. Dishearteningly such signs are not yet to be seen in the governance of tourism in New Zealand. Lovelock examines the institutional and policy frameworks relevant for tourism development at regional and local levels. He finds little evidence of a genuine concern with sustainability issues among policy-makers and the business community. Despitethe rhetoric in the national and subnational strategies for tourism, policy legitimacy emerges as a major obstaclefor incorporating sustainability in the governance of local tourism. Two destinations are more closely examined: Catlins,which is an emerging destination for which a preventive regulatory approach to sustainability should apply; andQueenstown, an established destination where a recovery approach is needed, as the unplanned intensive growth overthe past decades has already generated negative social and environmental impacts. These case studies reveal thatthe 1991 Resource Management Act does not provide an adequate regulatory approach to tourism permitting. Thelegal and institutional frameworks relevant for sustainable development are weak, which lies at the heart of thelegitimacy problem for a sustainability-based tourism governance in New Zealand.

The Member States of the European Union (EU) seem to have the opposite problem: too many policy andlegislative tools and many levels of governance affecting tourism development locally. However, from this thickpolicy soup something meaningful still seems to emerge, as Anastasiadou explains. For decades, tourism was excludedfrom the economic sectors for which EU Treaties gave European political authorities competencies to adopt policies,and enforce them on Member States. In this context, the EU tried to steer tourism towards sustainability through softinstruments, such as guidelines and recommendations, and by means of generic tools such as the Lisbon Strategy,the Cohesion Policy and the Sustainable Development Strategy. Many financial schemes also target sustainabilitygoals at project level. Although the impact of these multiple interacting top-down tools is yet to be rigorously evaluated,signs are emerging that the EU approach warmed hearts and opened minds among both local public authorities and thebusiness community, in established and emerging tourism destinations.

Such behavioural change, underpinned by significant policy and governance innovations, is what numerousparticipants to the recent symposium on biophysical limits in Wellington advocate (‘Biophysical Limits and their PolicyImplications’, 8-9 June 2011). Jonathan Boston reviews the key themes explored during this symposium. He explainsthat the earth’s resources are typically categorized as nonrenewable, conditionally renewable and inexhaustible. Thesustainability debate is connected to the normative debate on which – and whether – the first two types of resources are substitutable. Here lies a key difference between ‘weak’ and ‘strong sustainability’. Such conceptualizations are importantas they underpin policies and institutions that should move societies towards a greener type of development, respectingthe physical boundaries of planet Earth – its resource, sink and thermodynamic boundaries. Boston reflects further onthe policy design and political challenges ahead to enable a safer, sustainable development.

Aside from the five articles on sustainability issues, this issue of Policy Quarterly contains four other contributions.These canvass a diverse range of topics: David Penman, Andrew Pearce and Missy Morton reflect on one of the keychallenges facing New Zealand science, namely how to embrace a more collaborative mode of inter-institutionalworking; related to this, Jo Cribb, Robbie Lane, Heather Penny, Kylie van Delden and Kathie Irwin explore the lessonsfor cross agency, cross-sector working arising out of a recent governmental project designed to improve outcomes forvulnerable children; Mike Reid reviews recent and impending changes in English local government and their lessons forNew Zealand; Paul Barber explores how New Zealand might reduce its current high level of income inequality; and PaulCallister and Judith Galtry critically assess an article by Maureen Baker on paid parental leave which appeared inthe August issue of this journal. Hopefully, there will be something here to excite the interest to all readers.

Valentina Dinica
Guest Editor

The New New Zealand Tax System

2011-11-06T15:11:33Z

Perhaps the most prominent political debate in New Zealand is about tax. This book provides a new perspective on this critical subject, examining what we know about our tax system, and showing how that falls short of what we should know.

It details how tax works in the countries New Zealanders normally look to for policy comparison. It shows New Zealand has a tax system of extremes. We charge less tax than almost any comparable country on high incomes, dividends, and capital gains. Our GST however, is bigger than most, both as a proportion of taxes and as a proportion of the economy as a whole. And our goal of aligning top personal and company tax rates is not one that other rich democracies seem to share.

They say that in order to change tomorrow, first you must understand today. This book helps everyone, tax experts and interested laypeople alike, understand our tax system today.

IPS WP11/10 - Financial abuse of older people in New Zealand

2011-11-02T18:59:17Z

There is no single internationally accepted definition of elder abuse. This inhibits meaningful comparison of data. New Zealand generally uses the definition adopted by the World Health Organisation:

“A single or repeated act or lack of appropriate action, occurring within any relationship where there is an expectation of trust, which causes harm or distress to an older person”.

Within this definition, financial elder abuse (FEA) is defined as the “illegal or improper exploitation or use of funds or resources of the older person” (Wolf, Daichman and Bennett, 2002, p. 127).

This working paper is linked to a workshop hosted by the Institute of Policy Studies, Victoria University of Wellington, in June 2011. Following discussion of definitional issues and exploration of what we know about FEA, we identify strategies to prevent and reduce FEA in New Zealand. Our purpose is to promote discussion and development of policies which ensure a multi-faceted response to this issue. This will help to ensure that older people are free from elder abuse in all its forms.

The Costs of Crime - Towards Fiscal Responsibility

2011-10-19T17:58:57Z

In 2012 the New Zealand government spent $3.4 billion, or nearly $800 per person, on responses to crime via the justice system. Research shows that much of this spending does little to reduce the changes of re-offending. Relatively little money is spent on victims, the rehabilitation of offenders or to support the families of offenders.

This book is based on papers presented at the Costs of Crime forum held by the Institute of Policy Studies in February 2011. It presents lessons from what is happening in Australia, Britain and the United States and focuses on how best to manage crime, respond to victims, and reduce offending in a cost-effective manner in a New Zealand context.

It is clear that strategies are needed that are based on better research and a more informed approach to policy development. Such strategies must assist victims constructively while also reducing offending. Using public resources to lock as many people in our prisons as possible cannot be justified by the evidence and is fiscally unsustainable; nor does such an approach make society safer. To reduce the costs of crime we need to reinvest resources in effective strategies to build positive futures for those at risk and the communities needed to sustain them.

IPS WP 11/06 - Restructuring � an over-used lever for change in New Zealand�s state sector?

2011-10-10T18:40:14Z

Is restructuring the hammer of organisational change in New Zealand’s state sector? A State Services Commission (SSC) survey of state sector employees in 2010 identified that 65 per cent of the 4,600 staff sampled had been involved in a merger or restructure during the previous two years, a sharp contrast with a similar survey of the federal government of the United States, which found that only 18 per cent were affected. These statistics raise questions which form the basis of this paper: why, how and to what effect are state sector organisations restructured in New Zealand?

Our research started with a review of empirical data on restructuring and of perspectives from the literature on restructuring in the public and private sectors. We then explored these perspectives in three separate focus groups in May 2011, with chief executives, human resource managers and Public Service Association (PSA) delegates and organisers. Not surprisingly, chief executives (CEs) who initiate restructuring have a considerably more optimistic view about its role and impact than those who are affected by it. Annex One is a reflection piece written by one of the most experienced New Zealand public service chief executives, Christopher Blake, Chief Executive of the Department of Labour, (and Chief Executive of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra from 2012), provides a balance to the more sceptical argument presented in this paper.

We conclude that restructuring has indeed become the ‘hammer’ of organisational change in New Zealand, a result of the ‘freedom to manage’ formula adopted in the late 1980s to break up a unified and ‘career for life’ bureaucracy that was seen to respond to slowly to the economic crises of the 1980s. Restructuring has become almost an addiction, reinforced by short, fixed term contracts for chief executives and a belief by those chief executives that their employer, the State Services Commission, expects them to be seen to be ‘taking charge’. Restructuring is a symbol and sometimes and substitute for action. It treats organisations as though they are mechanical objects with interchangeable parts rather than as living systems of people who have choices about the extent to which they will commit to their work. Organisational change receives considerably less scrutiny than funding proposals for major capital works. We advocate that restructuring should be subject to such scrutiny and chief executives need to act more like stewards of their organisations and less like owners.

IPS WP 11/05 - Skills and people capability in the future state: Needs, barriers and opportunities

2011-10-10T18:34:21Z

The initial paper in the Future State Project (IPS Working paper 10/08) describes several powerful new trends beginning to impact on public sector management including limited funding, rising public expectations, and more complex problems. But what are the implications of these trends on human resource management (HRM) within the New Zealand public sector? What ideas are emerging within the HRM literature, and how do these relate to the perspectives of practitioners – human resource managers, CEOs and senior executives, and staff – in New Zealand’s public sector organisations?

The formal system in New Zealand, focused on improvement of pre-specified and auditable outputs monitored through detailed agency performance plans, may no longer be sufficient for the public sector environment of the future. Instead, new individual and collective capabilities may be needed. Current state servants have been selected, developed and rewarded in an environment which has emphasised stability, control, linear accountability and outputs. In contrast, we will argue that the emerging environment requires adaptability and the ability to work across public, private and non-profit public sector boundaries, locally and internationally. Bottom line accountability for the efficient operations of a tightly defined functional task is fundamentally different from the messiness of managing public sector responses to shifting social and economic challenges which have no easily defined finish lines.

We begin this paper with an overview of the current state of skills and people capability in the New Zealand public sector, including employee commitment and engagement, and the impact of the new wave of reforms over the last decade. We then identify several emerging ideas about the future of public sector HRM, including the need to develop better leaders, encourage innovation and collaboration, and take a longer term, more intense effort in capability development. These ideas were explored with practitioners in a series of focus groups in April and May 2011. In this paper, we discuss the results of the focus groups, in which we found general agreement with many of the ideas tabled for discussion but some key differences in perspective between human resource managers, CEOs and senior executives, and staff. We conclude this paper with a discussion of the future of public sector HRM in New Zealand.

Policy Quarterly Volume 7 Issue 3

2011-08-22T17:23:23Z

This edition of Policy Quarterly was not designed around a specific theme but it is interesting to note that several of the papers deal with the effects of increasing diversity and complexity in the present and the implications for the ways and means of governing in the future. These papers convey a sense that the institutional framework which has served for recent decades will have to change significantly if New Zealand governments and the public sector are function effectively in the 21st century.

At a recent conference presented at the Institute of Policy Studies/Manaaki Whenua Landcare Research, Paul Reynolds, Chief Executive of the Ministry for the Environment, raised questions about biophysical limits and their policy implications. In his view a significant part of the problem lies in the nature of the present policy institutions. New types are needed to meet the complex policy challenges of the present and future.

Collaborative, collective entities, some of them grown locally, are showing the way. Michael Mintrom pursues a similar line of thought. He is disappointed with the recommendations of the recent review of expenditure on policy advice arguing that policy analysts need to give politicians the services that they need to perform as policy leaders and agents of transformative change.

For policy advice to create public value, it must be developed in a way that also shapes public desires and perceptions. To achieve this, different kinds of policy development organisations are required. These would extend outside the public sector and bring diverse groups of people together to discuss pressing public issues and how they might be resolved. Living standards are broader than income alone, and are determined by a wide range of material and nonmaterial factors. In an important development, Treasury has created a wide-ranging framework to conceptualise and measure living standards, designed to enable consistent policy advice to government. Ben Gleisner, Mary Llewellyn-Fowler and Fiona McAlister provide an overview of this work. The framework recognises the importance of looking beyond economic measures in assessing living standards, to matters such as citizens’freedoms and rights, the distribution and sustainability of living standards, and self-assessed subjective measures of well-being.

Confronted by difficult economic times, the National-led government is demanding expenditure reduction across the public sector. Bill Ryan reviews the public management research for lessons that can be applied but is sceptical that much inefficiency or waste is left to be found. Cutbacks often have organisational and staff effects that reduce the capacity of the public sector to do the job that government and citizens want.

Institutional innovations with potential are emerging elsewhere that promise long-term reductions in public resourcing but will involve significant short and medium term costs in developing them. With a rising chorus of demands for institutional reform in New Zealand, how to move forward? Derek Gill and Susan Hitchiner suggest that public management in New Zealand is at a crossroad with no clear direction ahead, so they offer five possible strategies. These range from small-scale incremental development to a larger, more ambitious programme of sector-wide change, through to a final option of dealing with the fundamental political issues that are holding back development of public management.

Regulation is a core function of government but there is contest over the best and most effective way to regulate. Peter Mumford is concerned for the state of our regulatory regimes. He wonders whether it would be better to treat each as an experiment and then continually check whether they are working in practice. To test this idea he creates a framework based on seven attributes and retrospectively applies these to the 1991 building regulations that led to ‘leaky buildings’. Working thus, he suggests, would provide initial diagnostic and early-warning devices for monitoring the outcomes of regulation more effectively than has been achieved to date.

The last three papers in this edition all focus on social policy issues, very much to the fore in New Zealand with the recent Welfare Working Group (WWG) report. A major concern of the Welfare Working Group (WWG) was households whose working-age members on benefits have a marginal attachment to the labour market, seeking ways to motivate these people into paid work. Tony Burton suggests that standard bureaucratic rules based on the presumed effects of matters such as effective marginal tax rates, are not adequate to understand how and why a large proportion of such people act as they do. A better analysis would examine the sources of income and the uncertainty of work for people with low skills. It would also look at the incentives created by additional sources of benefit income and informal income. Stace and Sullivan focus on the impact of the WWG’s recommendations on individuals and families in the disability community, particularly given the WWG report’s preoccupation with paid work. Two concerns are uppermost. The first is that most disabled adults experience fluctuating capacity, and a lack of suitable work and understanding of the overall effects of having multiple impairments. The second is that single and partnered invalid beneficiaries carry out a considerable amount of voluntary and unpaid work each week. If they are forced into low-quality, low-paid work, significant opportunity costs would be incurred. Maureen Baker’s paper on key issues in paid parental leave policy rounds out this edition. In 2002 New Zealand employees gained access to paid parental leave, but other countries such as Canada established these benefits much earlier and/or used a mix of policy parameters. Paid parental leave is essential for women’s employment equity, as is subsidised child care services. Employment choices and constraints are not the same for most mothers and fathers. Development of social programmes must acknowledge gendered patterns of work.

Bill Ryan

Resilience in the Pacific - Addressing the Critical Issues

2011-07-12T17:19:38Z

On 16 and 17 February 2011 the New Zealand Institute of International Affairs and the Institute of Policy Studies, Victoria University of Wellington, co-hosted a conference that sought to bring fresh insights into the formidable array of major challenges facing New Zealand’s Pacific neighbours. The focus of the conference was on the nature, relevance and implications of the concept of ‘resilience’ as applied in the Pacific, in the face of those daunting challenges. Most of the texts presented are in this book of proceedings. It will be seen that collectively they highlighted the seeming intractability of long-standing regional and local problems: weak governance, access barriers in metropolitan markets, political patronage, population pressures on limited natural resources, the disproportionate sixe of public sectors, and challenges around economic and resource sustainability. AS well, New Zealand’s near-neighbours are now confronted by a new suite of modern-day issues: climate change, cross-border crime, labour mobility, and more recently the intrusion of great-power rivalries into the region. On a regional basis the Pacific has to date struggled to gain real traction towards achievement of the MDGs.

Yet grounds for cautious optimism were identified: for example, in the evidence emerging that the region may be blessed with more bountiful natural resources in and beneath its vast ocean realm than has hitherto been realised. Speakers pointed to areas of opportunity under-valued or untapped: in developing visionary leadership, building self-confidence, utilising the strengths and loyalties of the Pacific ‘diaspora’, adopting more ambitious schemes of infra structure development, promoting better awareness of the quality of Pacific products, and focussing donor perceptions more on the potential of the formal aid programme to function as an enabler to progress not as growth constraint.

The official and civil society dialogue on ways of tackling Pacific issues more effectively and successfully is destined to continue for many years to come. We trust the accumulated experience and wisdom captured in the chapters of this volume will represent a helpful contribution to that on-going conversation.