TOPIC 2.5: What is Responsive and Responsible Decision-Making?

Responsive and responsible in context

Within the paradigm adopted by the public administrator is embedded the notion of what being responsive means, and what evidence should be used when making a decision. Frameworks offer a rounded model of what needs to be considered when making appropriate decisions. Modern government is expected to be guided by ‘evidence’, which can support rational and transparent decision-making. These issues are discussed in this Topic 5.

Frameworks

Frameworks are important to ensure there is some stability and continuity within and across government. Where they don’t exist, the Government, for example, could find itself competing across Departments for staff and raising the price of labour (E.g. various Departments might require social workers to oversight safety, mental health compliance, allied health assessments, prisoner rehabilitation and, in contesting for recruits, artificially lift the price by bidding for a scarce commodity); or, agreeing through workplace bargains to pay staff on similar pay points more in the most affluent Departments than staff in less affluent. This can lead in some cases to staff pay inequities of many tens of thousands of dollars. A framework can be considered similar to a strategy or plan about the way government intends to operate. Examples are:

• People or workforce framework
• Policy framework
• Financial management framework
• Performance framework

These will be treated in more detail in subsequent Units.

Evidence-based decision-making

To help you think about the importance of evidence-based decision-making, we use the case of the Home Insulation Scheme roll-out. Who made the decision to roll out insulation as a means of distributing money to the community and which led to hundreds of house fires and the deaths of four young men?

What aspects of the decision making process went wrong? What evidence was assessed by those making the decision? What is reasonable risk for the public sector? What relationship was there between the decision to privatise training for installers and a treatment for GFC? Government rises and falls upon its decision-making ability. What models should it adopt?

In some cases, public sector decision-making is determined by numerous paradigms. For example, the political persuasion of the party in power; small ‘L’ liberal or alternative views of the world;

One phrase that says a lot in the modern public sector is the need to undertake ‘evidence-based decision-making’, which is contrasted with ‘opinion-based’ or ‘beliefs-based’.

Public Policy Theory

The previous section hints at an issue which is worth considering further.  In an ideal world, policy would be done once: it would be perfectly developed, based on solid evidence, then perfectly implemented and achieve exactly what is intended.  Yet this rarely happens.  The reasons for this are many and complex, but the academic field of Public Policy sheds light on some important issues.

You may be familiar with the policy cycle^[1], which is a highly-stylised and idealised (perhaps naïvely optimistic) representation of policymaking.  There are many variations, but the version below is one of the best known in Australia.

The Australian Policy Cycle (Althaus, et al, 2023)

Despite still being widely-used as a tool to understand public policy, few people believe it represents reality in any meaningful way.  It would be surprising if anyone reading this document has regularly seen policy going neatly through these steps.  Since the 1950s, the policy cycle model has been challenged more and more by alternative ways of understanding policy development.

The most obvious criticism of the model is that it relies on a perfect world of time, resources and personnel.  Yet common-sense says this is rarely possible.  In the 1950s, Herbert Simon coined the term “bounded rationality” to describe the fact that policy makers are generally working to tight time constraints, with limited staff, incomplete information, patchy data and other constraints (Birkland 2020; Cairney 2020)^[2][3].  More broadly, humans have a limited brain capacity and governments can only focus on a few things at once.  Simon’s answer to this is that policy makers should still strive for perfect (“rational”) policy but ultimately need to “satisfice” – that is, be content with policy answers that are “good enough” given the constraints.

In response to Simon’s analysis, Charles Lindblom argued there was little point in even striving for perfect policy.  While fully agreeing with Simon’s points about bounded rationality, Lindblom added some of his own.  He claimed, firstly, that policy often has to be developed despite a lack of clearly-stated goals, and secondly, that it is impossible to overcome the political dimensions of policy development.  Given this, Lindblom claimed, policy makers should abandon attempts at grand policy-cycle style processes and perfect policy.  Instead, “incrementalism” or “the science of muddling through” is the answer, which means taking small steps as and when an opportunity arises which over time can improve policy or create big change (Birkland 2020; Cairney 2020).

Perhaps the polar opposite of the policy cycle is John Kingdon’s Policy Streams model (also known as the Multiple Streams model (Birkland 2020; Kingdon 2011)^[4].  Developed from Cohen, March and Olsen’s even more radically chaotic Garbage Can model, Kingdon argues most policymaking is fairly random.  Policy change occurs when there is an alignment of a problem, a policy and a political opportunity.  This alignment is unpredictable, but when it happens a “window of opportunity” opens meaning policy change is possible.  The window is only open briefly, so policy makers have to be ready with solutions because a drawn out development process will take too long.  In this model, solutions can be developed which are then touted around looking for a problem to be attached to, or the recommendations of a report can sit for years gathering dust and suddenly burst back to life when circumstances change.  If the model is correct, the policy environment is highly unpredictable, and policymakers are simply swept along with only limited scope for control.

Public servants, however, may not simply be passive recipients of events.  Many policy scholars argue that there is an iterative and interactive relationship between policymakers and the institutional worlds they operate within.  Within the broad field of “New Institutionalism” for example, many strands and individuals make this claim about agency interacting with structure (see for example, Historical Institutionalism and Rational Choice Institutionalism) (Lowndes, Marsh and Stoker 2018; Cairney 2020)^[5]

In a truly “bottom up” approach to implementation, Michael Lipsky demonstrates how even those on the front line, like nurses, police officers, social workers, traffic wardens, housing officers, and even university teaching staff(!) can effectively make policy as they go about their work (Lipsky 2010; Birkland 2020)^[6].  These “Street-Level Bureaucrats” variously interpret policy, deal with contradictions in it, streamline policy, bend rules, work around policies they dislike, change policy to make it work properly, misunderstand policy, or choose to simply ignore a policy.  This could be individuals alone, groups of staff or even whole offices or sections.  In the process, the policy being implemented is different to that developed and written down.  The ambition of the policy cycle and developing perfect, rational policy, may be admirable, but clearly there are a lot of obstacles to it in the real world.

Business Tools in Government

One impact of the New Public Management changes that have happened since the 1980s (mentioned earlier) was the expectation that government would behave more like the private sector, with a greater focus on value for money, efficiency, measurement and controlling expenditure (Maley, 2021)^[7].  This resulted in government agencies starting to use the tools of business, for example producing business cases to help justify proposals.

Another simple tool which became widespread is the SWOT analysis.

“A SWOT analysis tool is one of the most effective business and decision-making tools. SWOT analysis can help you identify the internal and external factors affecting your business.

A SWOT analysis helps you:

• • build on strengths (S)
  • minimise weakness (W)
  • seize opportunities (O)
  • counteract threats (T)”

(Queensland Government, 2022)^[8]

“The methodology has the advantage of being used as both a ‘quick and dirty’ tool or a comprehensive management tool… This flexibility is one of the factors that has contributed to its success.” (CIPD, 2023)^[9]