Senior Public Servants Research Articles

Bad governance in Australia and how to mitigate it

AbstractWe argue that new public management (NPM) and other processes have led to adverse selection and agency rent problems within the political elite in Australia. The politicisation of the public service and the rise of careerist politicians have led to the de‐separation of what was once two distinct career paths within the political elite. This has changed the decision premise of the advisory system for policy formation and implementation, leading to worse public policy, even policy disasters. We recommend that some of the principles of the Westminster form of government be updated and re‐instituted for political elites within the structures of the Australian government. We canvass four reforms: return to merit appointments and promotion for public servants; a return to tenure for senior public servants; an enhanced push for descriptive representation within the career public service; and a formal role for staffers with centralised appointments, inability to instruct public servants, and restrictions on political and policy roles once leaving public service. These are designed to end the distrust, perceived corruption, and poor governance in the Australian government.Points for practitioners Having separate career paths for non‐elected policy elites and elected elites is vital for information transmission and good governance. Each should operate with separate decision premises and work together in creative tension. NPM practices have weakened the separate career paths of public servants and politicians, leading to adverse selection and agency rent for both. The Westminster system has a logic that has been diluted or weakened within the Australian government, leading to poorer policy and policy disasters. The paper presents four areas for reform.

Postcolonial experiences of Chinese aid: Encountering and welcoming South–South aid from the middle

AbstractThis paper explores how public servants in aid‐recipient countries perceive and encounter the development structures and normative discourses of South–South partnerships. The paper draws on interviews with senior public servants in the Antigua and Barbuda government who interface directly with Chinese aid delivery. The public servants perceive that ‘Northern’ development models have largely failed and that ‘Southern’ donors can facilitate alternative development pathways. They understand that South–South partnerships give aid‐recipient countries greater control over their development futures, invoking some of the original radicalism of South–South partnerships. The public servants also perceive that Western critiques of Chinese aid are underpinned by orientalism, and they reject notions that they are being passively integrated into the Chinese government's global vision. Yet, they do not passively internalise the normative discourses on South–South partnerships. This paper advances a multi‐scalar postcolonial geographical analysis of South–South partnerships and will be of interest to those exploring how aid‐recipient countries navigate the politics and power relations of the contemporary global aid landscape. The paper also advances debates on how subaltern geopolitics play out in the context of increasing South–South partnerships. Finally, with its focus on South–South partnerships, the paper contributes to the aid ethnographies literature.

Evidence gaps and challenges in maintaining and increasing vaccine uptake: A Delphi survey with Australian stakeholders.

Increasing and maintaining vaccination uptake is crucial for preventing and managing infectious diseases. In the context of the post-coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic landscape, this paper examines the perceptions of immunisation implementers and policymakers to uncover the challenges and evidence gaps in routine immunisation efforts. We conducted an online two-round modified Delphi survey with immunisation experts, senior public servants, policymakers, policy advisory groups, and representatives from peak bodies from across Australia. We asked respondents to outline what they see as the greatest challenges to increasing and maintaining uptake of recommended vaccines in Australia; the most difficult aspects of their work in vaccination; the largest evidence gaps in vaccine uptake; and the kinds of social and behavioural research they would like to see prioritised. The two most important challenges for increasing and maintaining vaccine uptake were effectively communicating the benefits of vaccines to parents and the public and ensuring accessible and affordable vaccination services. Participants strongly agreed that 'communication about the importance of vaccination' was the most difficult aspect of their work. Consistently important was the need to better engage specific population groups, such as culturally and linguistically diverse people, pregnant people, at risk cohorts, and health care providers. Social and behavioural research about 'how to effectively address hesitancy' was ranked highly among participants. Findings from this project help provide an understanding of the behavioural, social, ethical, and policy knowledge needs for immunisation policy and implementation in Australia. To respond to vaccine challenges, increase coverage and build public trust in vaccination, policymakers and governments should incorporate social research into vaccination programmes. SO WHAT?: Australia is preparing to launch a Centre for Disease Control. This study demonstrates the importance of integrating social, behavioural, ethical, and policy research into the fabric of this new enterprise. It underlines the need to capacity-build a workforce able to deliver high-quality research in these areas, address the needs of immunisation implementers and policymakers, and achieve good outcomes for Australians.

Free riding is not the problem: how agency, heterogeneity and authority challenge collective action against antimicrobial resistance in the European Union

ABSTRACT This paper outlines a contextual approach to the governance of collective action in high complexity contexts. Using the major public health threat of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in Europe as empirical case, we investigate the coordination challenges related to a plurality of agency, heterogeneity of capabilities, preferences and institutions, and various degrees and forms of authority. The analysis draws on original quantitative and qualitative data on senior public servants’ and experts’ preferences for governance arrangements. Allowing for variation in agency, heterogeneity and authority, we identify factors preventing or facilitating transnational governance and explain how and why these factors persist. The pattern of experts’ governance preferences as indicated in surveys and interviews suggests that when collective action fails, it can often be attributed to the heterogeneity among EU member states in terms of their willingness and capacity to address AMR. Also, networks of AMR experts are seen as critical to successful governance, both in the human public health sector where formal authority is limited and in animal health where the EU has extensive formal authority. In human public health, networks are instruments for exchanging ideas, knowledge and learning while in animal health networks support hierarchies and facilitate horizontal coordination.

Public Sector Disciplinary practices and implications for Organizational Performance: towards a Recalibrated Sustainable Service Performance model

This study examined the relationship between the nature of staff disciplinary system and sustainable organisational performance. Utilizing descriptive statistics, categorical data correlation models and ordinal logistic regression model as well as t-test statistic, data gathered from both primary and secondary sources categorized and analyzed. Accordingly, findings showed: that delays in releasing of promotion, late payment of salaries and salaries cuts, etc are some of the causes of staff indiscipline; politics/tribal bias in handling disciplinary actions contribute to staff indiscipline. Also, the remuneration policy/salary structure as contained in the conditions of service is far from being individually oriented did not allow for performance-based reward system (PBRs). Thus, the study recommends urgent reform of the university’s conditions of service to allow for Compensatory individual Performance Related Pay (CiPRP) and the payment of salaries and promotion arrears of senior public servants (SPSs) as at when due; amongst others.

The End of the Policy Analyst? Testing the Capability of Artificial Intelligence to Generate Plausible, Persuasive, and Useful Policy Analysis

Policy advising in government centers on the analysis of public problems and the developing of recommendations for dealing with them. In carrying out this work, policy analysts consult a variety of sources and work to synthesize that body of evidence into useful decision support documents commonly called briefing notes. Advances in natural language processing (NLP) have led to the continuing development of tools that can undertake a similar task. Given a brief prompt, a large language model (LLM) can synthesize information in content databases. This article documents the findings from an experiment that tested whether contemporary NLP technology is capable of producing public policy relevant briefing notes that expert evaluators judge to be useful. The research involved two stages. First, briefing notes were created using three models: NLP generated; human generated; and NLP generated/human edited. Next, two panels of retired senior public servants (with only one panel informed of the use of NLP in the experiment) were asked to judge the briefing notes using a heuristic evaluation rubric. The findings indicate that contemporary NLP tools were not able to, on their own, generate useful policy briefings. However, the feedback from the expert evaluators indicates that automatically generated briefing notes might serve as a useful supplement to the work of human policy analysts. And the speed with which the capabilities of NLP tools are developing, supplemented with access to a larger corpus of previously prepared policy briefings and other policy-relevant material, suggests that the quality of automatically generated briefings may improve significantly in the coming years. The article concludes with reflections on what such improvements might mean for the future practice of policy analysis.

The accountability of collaborative innovations in tax administration: A Dutch-US comparison

Analyzing a collaborative public management innovation in tax administration in the US and the Netherlands, this article investigates how differences in accountability systems affect senior public servants’ felt accountability, which itself appears critical to understanding why innovations evolve differently over time, even when sharing similar starting conditions. The article makes three key contributions. First, employing elite interviews, findings highlight how institutional factors critically shape public servants’ felt accountability, hereby expanding existing scholarship and its concentration on microlevel psychological determinants. Second, against expectations, findings illuminate that ministerial-based senior public servants may display a greater degree of autonomy in innovation design and implementation compared to agency-based officials. Third, the article demonstrates that the configuration of accountability systems can change significantly over time, thereby critically affecting the evolution of innovations. This underlines the relevance of taking a longitudinal research approach to analyzing senior public servants’ attitude to collaborative innovations.

Lobbying the executives: differences in lobbying patterns between elected politicians, partisan advisors and public servants

Research from parliamentary countries suggests that lobbyists tend to focus their attention on public office holders within the executive government more than those within the legislative branch. To date, however, research studying executive-lobbying relations tends to treat “the executive” and “lobbyists” as two homogenous groups. Yet importantly, not all executive personnel and lobbyists are the same. The executive is made-up of popularly elected politicians, partisan advisors and non-partisan bureaucrats, who vary in their skills, motivations, responsibilities and power within government. Differences also exist in the level of expertise and political representativeness between in-house and consultant lobbyists. Using longitudinal data between 2015 and 2022 from Canada's Lobbyist Registry, this article digs deeper into the executive-lobbying nexus by examining the number of contacts consultant and in-house lobbyists have with different executive personnel—ministers, partisan advisors, senior public servants and non-senior public servants. Although the data shows no meaningful variation tied to differences across partisan-political and administrative personnel within the executive, there is substantive variation in lobbying intensity between upper and lower ranked executive personnel; in-house lobbyists lobby senior political and senior administrative personnel twice as much as consultant lobbyists. These findings are consistent with theory on the expertise and representative function some lobbyists possess, more so than theory emphasizing differences between partisan-political and administrative personnel within the executive.

Examining the Contextual Factors Influencing Intersectoral Action for the SDGs: Insights From Canadian Federal Policy Leaders.

The interdependent and intersecting nature of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) require collaboration across government sectors, and it is likely that departments with few past interactions will find themselves engaged in joint missions on SDG projects. Intersectoral action (IA) is becoming a common framework for different sectors to work together. Understanding the factors in the environment external to policy teams enacting IA is crucial for making progress on the SDGs. Interviews [n=17] with senior public servants leading SDG work in nine departments in the federal government of Canada were conducted to elicit information about issues affecting how departments engage in IA for the SDGs. Transcripts were coded based on a set of factors identified in a background review of 20 documents related to Canada's progress on SDGs. Iterative group thematic analysis by the authors illuminated a set of domestic and global contextual factors affecting IA processes for the SDGs. The mechanisms for successful IA were identified as facilitative governance, leadership by a central coordinating office, supportive staff, flexible and clear reporting structures, adequate resources, and targeted skills development focused on collaboration and cross-sector learning. Factors that affect IA positively include alignment of the SDG agenda with domestic and global political priorities, and the co-occurrence of social issues such as Indigenous rights and gender equity that raise awareness of and support for related SDGs. Factors that affect IA negatively include competing conceptual frameworks for approaching shared priorities, lack of capacity for "big picture" thinking among bureaucratic staff, and global disruptions that shift national priorities away from the SDGs. IA is becoming a normal way of working on problems that cross otherwise separate government accountabilities. The success of these collaborations can be impacted by contextual factors beyond any one department's control.

Preparedness of Senior Public Service Pharmacists for Clinical Leadership Roles: A Cross-Sectional Study

Background The Seven-star Pharmacist concept as promulgated by the World Health Organization identifies the pharmacist as a leader, among many other roles. Clinical leadership skills are essential in all healthcare organizations, regardless of position or area of practice, yet many pharmacists remain unaware of how leadership can be integrated into their daily clinical practice. While there is limited literature on pharmacist and clinical leadership preparedness in the sub-Saharan African region, particularly in Ghana, concerns about the hospital working environment and learning opportunities suggest that pharmacists feel unprepared for the responsibilities of clinical leadership. Furthermore, most leadership preparedness literature focuses on physicians, nurses, and public health professionals, with pharmacists being underrepresented. This study aims to address these gaps and provide insights into methods to enhance pharmacist leadership readiness in Ghana. Methodology The current study was an anonymous, online based, quantitative, cross-sectional survey conducted between April and June 2022. Participants were public service pharmacists drawn from the Government and Hospital Pharmacist Association (GHOSPA) of Ghana, who worked in government-funded health facilities within the Greater Accra region of Ghana, one of the sixteen administrative regions of the country. The questionnaire consisted of a set of questions that employed a combination of Likert scales, multiple-choice, open-ended, and closed-ended questions. The questionnaire comprised the following sections: biodata of participants and ratings of their level of preparedness for clinical leadership roles using a 5 point Likert scale. Results Nearly half of respondents (46%, n=67) reported their level of preparedness for a clinical leadership role was poor (32%) or very poor (14%). Self-reported level of knowledge and understanding of their clinical leadership roles at the time of their appointment was fair for 35% (n=51) of the respondents, whereas 23% (n=34) reported poor or very poor knowledge of the participants in the study, 65% reported receiving some form of training on clinical leadership either at the time of appointment or during their assignment, with only 35% reporting their training to be effective. Conclusion The study underscores the importance of addressing the knowledge gaps and training needs of pharmacists to enhance their preparedness for clinical leadership roles. Furthermore, organizational policies, career development opportunities, and support systems need to be established to promote effective clinical leadership roles among pharmacists. Keywords: Clinical leadership, pharmacist, preparedness, Ghana

Leadership and innovation by professionals: The changing face of public workplace conflict resolution in Ireland

AbstractSince the early 1990s public dispute resolution in Ireland has undergone significant reform. The paper examines external and internal pressures for the reform of conflict resolution in Ireland and reveals the key roles played by senior public servants and conflict management professionals in a system where politics and political divisions had little effect on the reform process.

Promiscuously partisan public servants? Publicly defending and promoting the government’s reputation to the detriment of bureaucratic impartiality and truthfulness

PurposeFor many, the claim that a new approach to bureaucracy—new political governance (NPG)—is underway reads as if it was written by Stephen King: Frightening fiction. While the thought of promiscuously partisan senior public servants publicly defending and promoting the government’s reputation to the demise of impartiality is disturbing, the evidentiary record has led most to dismiss the idea as empirically false. This article questions, and empirically investigates, whether dismissing the idea of promiscuous partisanship has been premature.Design/methodology/approachA case study of the loyalty displayed by Canada’s most senior public servant during a highly publicized parliamentary committee is analysed with a novel theoretical and empirical approach in three steps. First, the Clerk of the Privy Council (Clerk)’s committee testimony is analysed against analytical constructs of impartial and promiscuous partisan loyalty that focuses on the testimony’s direction and substance. Second, the objectivity and truthfulness of the testimony is analysed by comparing what was publicly claimed to have occurred against evidence submitted to the committee that provids an independent record of events. Third, the perception the Clerk’s testimony had on some committee members, political journalists and members of the public is analysed through print media and committee Hansard.FindingsWhile the Clerk’s testimony displays an awareness of upholding impartiality, it also comprises promiscuous partisanship. Throughout his testimony, the Clerk redirects from the line of questioning to defend and promote the sitting government’s reputation. Moreover, to defend and promote the government’s reputation the Clerk’s testimony moved away from objectivity and engaged in truth-obfuscating tactics. Finally, the nature of the Clerk’s testimony was perceived by some committee members and the public—including former senior public servants—as having abandoned impartiality to have become a public “cheerleader” of the government.Research limitations/implicationsEmploying an in-depth case study limits the extent to which the findings concerning the presence of promiscuously partisan loyalty can be generalized beyond the present case to the larger cadre of senior public servants.Originality/valueEmpirically, while most research has dismissed claims of promiscuous partisanship as empirically unfounded, this article provides what is possibly the strongest empirical case to date of a public incident of promiscuous partisanship at the apex of the bureaucracy. As such, scholars can no longer dismiss NPG as an interesting idea without much empirical leverage. Theoretically, this article adds further caution to Aucoin’s original narrative of NPG by suggesting that promiscuous partisanship might not only involve senior public servants defending and promoting the government, but that doing so may push them to engage in truth-obfuscating tactics, and therein, weaken the public’s confidence in political institutions. The novel theoretical and empirical approach to studying senior public servants’ parliamentary testimony can be used by scholars in other settings to expand the empirical study of bureaucratic loyalty.

A Qualitative Analysis of Strategic Management and Planning in the Gambian Public Service Organizations

The study investigated strategic management and planning practices for public service delivery (PSD) in public service organisations (PSOs) in The Gambia. The study adopted “qualitative research design”, through the conduct of in-depth interviews with senior public servants and beneficiaries of the selected PSOs, with a sample size of 20 using purposive sampling technique. The findings from interviews conducted with senior public servants and beneficiaries of PSOs showed that strategic plans of PSOs were formulated, implemented and evaluated in consultation with both internal and external stakeholders to accommodate divergent views and interests of influential groups and individuals in the study area. Also, the study established that PSOs reviewed and effected slight changes to their strategic plans to keep abreast with the environment during the implementation process. The paper concluded that strategic management has shaped PSD in PSOs; strategic plans implementation impacted on PSD; and that strategic plans implementation helped in achieving the goals and objectives of PSOs in PSD in the study area.

When the cat is away: How institutional autonomy, low salience, and issue complexity shape administrative action

AbstractPolitical issues sometimes display an intriguing combination of high degrees of complexity, low political saliency, and high levels of administrative autonomy. This article investigates how this type of issues shapes the relationship between politicians and the public service. More specifically, we advance the notion of “administrative action space” to describe the emergence of collaborative governance when directives from the political level are intermittent or absent. Using an illustrative case on the administration of measures to address antimicrobial resistance (AMR), a transnational public health issue in Europe, we find that senior public servants nested in epistemic communities play a leading role in driving agency and facilitating governance of complex but low‐salient issues when administrative autonomy is extensive.

New public sector management (NPM) doctrines and service delivery: the case of Mauritius

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to investigate into the perception of new public sector management (NPM) and service delivery among senior officers of the Mauritian public sector in the context of reforms. Although improved service delivery is one of the salient outcomes of successful reforms of NPM, many governments in the world have not been able to fulfil this promise. While few extant research probe into the factors affecting service delivery, mostly from the customer’s perspective, this study probes into how senior public officers themselves perceive service delivery as part of their duty in government.Design/methodology/approachThe qualitative stance was adopted for this study. Interviews were conducted with 23 senior public officers having on average 20 years of service in the Mauritian public sector. Data obtained was transcribed and coded under themes, sub-themes and emergent themes. These were then analysed in the light of the literature review conducted.FindingsThe findings of this study revealed that NPM was being practiced and service delivery was an imbedded factor among senior public sector officers of the Mauritian public sector. Among other factors, officers interviewed were of the opinion that serving the public was a legitimate part of their job, view that they had agreed to serve the government of Mauritius. Such a finding proves to be very encouraging for the Mauritian Government, still struggling to achieve reforms or NPM doctrines.Research limitations/implicationsThis study contributes to the scant literature on NPM and service delivery in small island developing states. It explores the perception of experienced senior officers about the practice of NPM and the state of service delivery.Practical implicationsThis study elucidates how senior public servants themselves perceive service delivery and can, thus, serve as an example of public sector best practices in small island developing states.Originality/valueWhile most studies with respect to public sector reforms concentrate on developed countries, this study takes place in the small island state of Mauritius. More so, the perception of public servants themselves have been explored in the context of service delivery improvement and reforms, contrary to other studies which concentrate of the customers’ perceptions.

Understanding public service provision using digital technologies during COVID-19 lockdowns in New Zealand through a complexity theory lens

Complexity theory is used to explore an exemplar of how digital government services evolved under conditions of uncertainty and rapid change created by COVID-19 in 2020. Based on a qualitative, constructivist research design, informed by interviews with key senior public servants and document analysis, the complexity lens helps us to understand how provisions of digital public services were quickly adapted and evolved to meet new and emerging needs experienced because of the pandemic. Means for making collective sense of the unknown from which to plan first steps, learning from doing, agility, co-construction and adaptive leadership are in evidence.

Climate change, society, and health inequities.

Climate change, society, and health inequities.

The straight and narrow path: policy direction and oversight of the gay purges in Canada

The gay purges from the late 1950s to the late 1970s were the only large-scale dismissals from the public service of Canada in its history. As this article demonstrates, this arbitrary action was taken without regard to individual circumstances and without due process or appeal, simply because of the sexuality of those targeted. Presumptions were made - and acted upon - about a supposed link between homosexuality and disloyalty, with a consequently imagined threat to national security. Although the implementation of the purges by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Security Service (RCMPSS) was undoubtedly zealous and harsh, that conduct took place within a framework that was constructed by policy-makers in the Privy Council Office, overseen by senior public servants and ultimately sanctioned by successive Canadian cabinets. As this examination shows, the RCMPSS acted, however severely, with authority granted to it by others who would later try to distance themselves from responsibility and pose as sympathetic to those purged. In fact, this was not the drastic misapplication of a measured policy, as sometimes contended, but a deliberate, malevolent, and ultimately mistaken attempt to deal with an imagined threat.

Executive‐parliamentary relations in Canada: Moving forward from the pandemic

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Tensions and opportunities in the roles of senior public health officials in Canada: A qualitative study

Although public health emergencies like the COVID-19 pandemic thrust senior public health officials into the spotlight, their day-to-day roles remain misunderstood and under-examined. In jurisdictions that follow the Westminster system of government such as Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia, Chief Medical Officers of Health (CMOHs) are typically senior public servants who are simultaneously positioned as public health professionals with independent expertise, senior advisors to an elected government, and designated protectors of the public health interest. Using Canada's federal and provincial CMOHs as case studies of this role in Westminster governments, we analyzed in-depth key informant interview data to examine how CMOHs navigate the tensions among their duties to the government, profession, and public in order to maximize their public health impact. We demonstrate that CMOHs are variously called upon to be government advisors, public health managers, and public communicators, and that the different emphasis that jurisdictions place on these roles shapes the tools and pathways through which CMOHs can influence government action and public health. We also elucidate the tensions associated with having CMOHs positioned within the senior levels of the public service and the strategies these officials use to balance their internal- and external-facing roles. Finally, we highlight the trade-offs among different institutional design options to inform decisions about the structure of the CMOH position in different contexts.