related resources

on our site

news

Home page
> About the Public Service Commissioner > Speech
> Media >
‹ Previous page

Contemporary Government Challenges: Delivering performance and accountability and the intersections with ‘wicked’ policy problems

Presentation by Lynelle Briggs
Meeting of the International Society for the Systems Sciences (ISSS)
Plenary Session:  Enhancing governance with systems thinking and practice
Brisbane, 15 July 2009

Introduction

It’s a pleasure to be here in Brisbane this morning and to have the chance to speak to you about some of the work the Australian Public Service Commission has been doing in the public sector to promote systemic approaches for dealing with complex public policy problems. 

Principle among this work is a series of papers under the banner of Contemporary Government Challenges.  These papers encourage public servants to reflect on important challenges for public administration as a whole, and stimulate discussion and debate on the issues.

Systems thinking and Tackling Wicked Problems

One of the first of these papers was Tackling Wicked Problems: A Public Policy Perspective.  By ‘wicked problems’ I mean complex problems of public policy which, because of their changeability, interdependencies, multiple causes and internally conflicting goals, cannot be successfully treated with traditional analytical approaches.

A traditional bureaucracy, divided into vertical silos that do not communicate effectively with each other, with most of the authority for resolving problems resting at the top of the organisation, is not well-adapted for addressing the complexity and ambiguity of these types of problems. Bureaucracies tend to be risk averse, and do not manage messy processes well. They excel at managing issues with clear boundaries rather than ambiguous and complex issues that may require experimental and innovative approaches.

‘Successfully solving or at least managing these wicked policy problems requires a reassessment of some of the traditional ways of working and solving problems in the Australian Public Service. They challenge our governance structures, our skills base and our organisational capacity…[S]uccessfully tackling wicked problems requires…thinking that is capable of grasping the big picture, including the interrelationships among the full range of causal factors underlying them…[T]hey often require broader, more collaborative and innovative approaches…[W]icked problems highlight the fundamental importance of…working across organisational boundaries both within and outside the APS.’¹

Wicked problems are difficult to clearly define.  The nature and extent of the problem often depends on who you ask—with different stakeholders having different versions of what the problem is. Often, each version of the policy problem has an element of truth—no one version is complete or verifiably right or wrong. 

There are many definitions of systems thinking and I would have to say that a fair bit of what has been written on the subject is rather academic in tone.  I was struck when leafing through the conference program, by a comment in one of the abstracts² to the effect that, while systems approaches can be challenging even for scholars, those who are used to systems thinking find the ideas ‘intuitive and appealing.’

Certainly what I understand to be the basic premise underlying systems thinking—that to understand a problem, it is necessary to look at it within the context of a larger whole, and examine the linkages and interactions between the elements that comprise that larger whole—is one that I personally find intuitive and appealing.

I am convinced that this type of thinking is going to be increasingly important for the way we operate in the public service.  I am also fairly certain that the majority of policy makers in the Australian Public Service would admit to being similarly attracted to systems thinking on an intuitive level.

Whole of Government approaches

Why then, more than five years after the Management Advisory Committee released its report on Connecting Government³, are we still struggling to put the joined up approaches recommended in that report into practice?

I don’t think it’s a lack of commitment from the top.  There has been strong, high level support for the whole of government approach.  The need to work collaboratively for the delivery of programmes and services features prominently in any discussion of the future directions for public service reform in Australia.

There are also existing flexibilities in our performance management frameworks that can be used to support whole of government approaches. Ministers may bring joint submissions to Cabinet, for example, and the Cabinet Expenditure Review Committee may consider related proposals from separate portfolios in a single session, on the basis of a common briefing.

The financial management arrangements also provide some flexibility. The current Department of Finance and Deregulation guidance on outcomes and outputs provides that where agency outcomes are similar, agencies—even if they are in different portfolios—can agree to a single outcome statement within which they can establish their own outputs.  Agencies can also have funds appropriated to a central account, to be drawn on by staff in different agencies.

Even allowing for these existing flexibilities, there remains a fundamental tension between the horizontal responsibilities in whole of government approaches and the vertical accountabilities embedded in the Westminster system of Cabinet Government, in which the existence of separate portfolio agencies reflects an underlying accountability of individual Ministers to Parliament. 

Under the Westminster system, differences are ultimately resolved in the Cabinet or by the Prime Minister.  In whole of government approaches, the expectation is that they will be resolved within and between agencies and it isn’t always clear who will take responsibility if something doesn’t work. 

Various countries have developed their own responses to these challenges, but nobody has yet found a means, or perhaps sufficient reason, to move away from a fundamentally vertical, departmental system of government. For most government activities, the concentration of functional expertise within separate agencies or portfolios offers many advantages that outweigh occasional problems of coordination.

In Australia, governments have experimented with various structures for managing whole of government initiatives, including task forces managed out of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, the use of boards of management or Ministerial Councils to oversee the work of agencies, and the use of a service delivery agency to manage a loose confederation of service providers.

The Australian National Audit Office has suggested that a lead agency should guide any large or complex whole of government exercise.  This makes sense in terms of ensuring that someone has ownership of the issue and an incentive to drive it along. The issue with this approach is that it anchors whole of government around the perspective of a single key agency.  While improving co-ordination and consistency of process, this comes at the cost of fewer opportunities for applying multiple perspectives to a common problem, and fewer incentives for individuals to challenge, dispute and explore.

This doesn’t much matter when there is broad community support for a concerted effort to solve a critical problem or deal with an emergency situations, like the responses to the 2004 Boxing Day Asian Tsunami and Cyclone Larry in Queensland in 2007.  But it is an important limitation when the Government is seeking to deal with a problem that isn’t yet fully understood or well-defined, or when the problem is more intractable or prolonged.

More work needs to be done on the accountability and performance management frameworks to ensure that whole of government approaches contribute effectively as an alternative form of policy implementation.

Delivering performance and accountability

In April we released another publication in our Contemporary Government Challenges series called Delivering Performance and Accountability.  This paper discussed the twin challenges facing the APS, of:

• removing unnecessary obstacles to innovation in order to improve the quality of outcomes in complex and uncertain policy areas, and
• developing more variegated accountability and performance management arrangements, better suited to new modes of policy implementation.

The accountability framework

In today’s environment, public servants are being asked to be more adaptive and inclusive, yet in many cases they resort to traditional problem solving techniques due to the constraints of a one-size-fits-all accountability and performance management framework.

That’s not to say that we should throw the baby out with the bathwater—accountability is absolutely fundamental to good government. The legitimacy of our institutions rests on confidence that public servants and elected representatives will provide a full and honest account of their actions when called to do so and be held accountable. Australians rightly see a high level of accountability of public officials as one of the essential guarantees and underpinnings of efficient, impartial and ethical public administration.

The challenge for the Australian Public Service is to improve accountability in a manner that does not constrain our ability to provide advice and services in an innovative and agile way. Some of you may be familiar with the Cutler Review of the National Innovation System, which concluded that experimentation in innovative policy and administration should be a major theme of the current refashioning of federal relations, and that modern innovation requires the loosening of hierarchical routine.

Vertical and horizontal models of accountability

In addition to the traditional model, which provides a vertical continuum of accountability relationships between the electorate, the Parliament, the Government and the public service, other horizontal accountability arrangements are also emerging, which need further development.

A number of public service reforms over recent decades have sought to make public servants more responsive to the needs of citizens to whom they provide services. This has been supported through mechanisms such as Citizens’ Charters, charging users for some services, and performance benchmarking. 

Public servants are now seen as accountable ‘outwards’ to the public as well as being accountable ‘upwards’ through the hierarchical chain of managerial command.

These horizontal relationships are of increasing importance to the new and emerging modes of policy implementation being developed to deal with complex and intractable problems.  

As it stands currently, this idea of outward accountability is relatively immature.  To the extent that an accountability relationship exists between a public servant and a member of the community—say, a Centrelink client—it is one in which the client has limited power to call the public servant to account for his or her actions. The power of the citizen to call the service provider to account is even weaker in the case of government services delivered by an outsourced provider. This is a significant challenge for emerging modes of policy implementation based on distributed and devolved government.

Accountability trade-offs

Rules-based accountability systems and standard operating procedures evolved as means of reducing the incidence of corruption, nepotism and waste and in order to help public servants do their jobs properly. 

The problem today is that rules and procedures can slow decision-making and constrain the choices available to decision-makers when they are confronted by new or unusual circumstances. While transparency increases the probability that poor decisions will be exposed, which helps to prevent foreseeable and preventable errors, it can also encourage conservative decision-making.

Innovation usually involves risk. In the public sector, where there is a high level of scrutiny of how things are done and a resultant aversion to risk taking, the disadvantages of taking that risk can be perceived to outweigh the possible benefits of success.  The day-to-day incentives created by traditional accountability arrangements favour adherence to process over innovation, and routine over experimentation. 

Of course, many of the things that government does are routine and predictable, and adherence to process is perfectly suited to those circumstances.  But given current demands for greater innovation and even more new ideas, it is important to ensure that the public service environment is broadly supportive of innovation. 

A flexible and adaptable public service needs to be free to sometimes try things without always being sure of their likely effects, or how well they will work. On occasion, the best policy option will involve uncertainty or even some deliberate trial and error. Accountability systems that punish public servants for unforeseen or unpreventable errors will constrain policy innovation and organisational learning, and limit the public service’s capacity to deal with new and emerging problems. 

Transformational change requires new accountability arrangements.

New modes of policy implementation

Many contemporary public policy problems seem resistant to the conventional problem solving techniques that have evolved within government. Governments in most advanced economies are responding to this challenge by experimenting with new modes of public policy implementation.

In putting together our publication, Delivering Performance and Accountability, we drew on the work of American academic Elaine Kamarck to propose a more diversified approach to accountability and performance management that might align with these new approaches.

Ms Kamarck defines three emerging forms of policy implementation:

• reinvented government, built around performance managed bureaucracies
• government by network, and
• government by market.

Reinvented Government—Performance Managed Bureaucracy

Australia has been characterised by reinvented government for the last 20 years.  Dr Kamarck cites cross-agency cooperation as an example of reinvented government, and describes performance managed bureaucracies as government ‘shorn of its public sector trappings’, especially rigid rules regarding budgets, personnel and procurement.  These are traded off for enhanced flexibilities and replaced or supplemented by outcome or output performance measures. Performance measures act as market proxies and customer service is used to model organisational behaviour.  Kamarck’s view of reinvented government is similar in many respects to what has been labelled ‘new public management’, with its general cuts to public spending and emphasis on private sector management styles.

Government by Network

In government by network, the public service works with a wide variety of outside institutions, including churches, universities, research laboratories and cooperative research centres, not-for-profit and for-profit organisations, and State and local government agencies. The Government funds these organisations to do the work it wants done. Australian examples of government by network are: the provision of health care and programmes to tackle homelessness.

Government by Market

Government by market involves few, if any, public employees and little or no public money. The Government uses state power to create or support a market that fulfils a public purpose, where that kind of market would not exist in the private sector. Examples of government by market include emissions trading schemes, the use of tradeable licences to manage fisheries, and the transition in water policy from a system of extraction-based rights attached to land titles and permit licences to a market-based system of water trading.

Accountability challenges

Each of these approaches presents challenges for our existing accountability and performance management frameworks.

Working across organisational boundaries

When performance managed bureaucracies are operating alone, and when they are dealing with relatively straightforward problems, the traditional accountability and performance frameworks work very well. Accountability problems arise when performance managed bureaucracies are asked to work across organisational or jurisdictional boundaries on joint problems that are complex in the sense of being decentralised or ambiguous. 

Working with third parties outside government

Where government by network is undertaken with non-government bodies, it is usually achieved through a contract between the government purchaser and the provider. Control is managed in terms of a formal agreement between parties that are otherwise separate and independent. Accountability is determined by the nature and terms of the contract.  Service standards can be specified and performance can be monitored against explicit criteria.

However, many contracts for government work are more open-ended than this ideal model might imply because they deal with more complicated situations. In many contracts the actual requirements are deliberately focused on achieving broad, high-level outcomes because there are too many potential aspects to be detailed in a legal document, the policy problem cannot be defined precisely, or solutions require a high level of flexibility and adaptation by the service provider. This allows for flexibility in the way services are provided, but also reduces the amount of information available to the Government and the Parliament on how services are provided on the ground.

In theory, Government by network may alter the way things are done, but should not change who is ultimately accountable for what is provided. Responsibility may be devolved, but accountability remains with the Minister and the official responsible for the expenditure of public monies. In practice, accountability can become blurred and it is sometimes difficult for users to determine who is responsible for the services provided or the overall outcomes achieved.

The accountability focus in most government by network arrangements is understandably on the performance of individual providers.  However, the community has expectations about the way in which publicly funded services that go beyond the strict requirements of contracts are provided. The traditional accountability framework for government by network is effective in ensuring that money is being spent appropriately and that services are being provided as specified in the contract, but it does not seem to extend very easily to evaluation of what the network as a whole is achieving, or what impact the performance of individual providers might be having on the rest of the network.

Although government by network provides an effective way of devising innovative solutions to complex and highly-distributed problems, it is vulnerable to some serious accountability deficits under the current accountability and performance management arrangements.

Working in collaboration with communities

One of the key emerging trends in public administrations around the world is more active engagement with those likely to be affected by government decisions, and I think it’s inevitable that the Australian public service will focus increasingly on citizen engagement. 

But there are challenges. Significantly, participative decision-making requires trusting relationships. Without trust, genuine collaboration is impossible. Yet, our current accountability arrangements don’t rely on trust; but on the demonstration and acquittal of responsibilities. It is difficult to persuade a stakeholder that they are fully trusted when they are denied the opportunity to decide how money is spent and obliged to account for monies they receive.

There are concerns that the institutional adjustments needed to make participative governance work would blur traditional lines of ministerial accountability and increase the risk of misappropriation of funds. Some analysts even fear that too much collaboration could undermine government accountability altogether.

A form of joint accountability is theoretically possible within the current legislative framework to cover arrangements that exist for third party drawing rights. But, this particular flexibility is heavily conditional and ultimate authority and accountability for the way in which funds are used rests with public servants, not with the third party beneficiary. Overseas experiments with collaborative partnerships have often involved joint decision-making and forms of horizontal management, but they have generally stopped short of any formal system of joint accountability.

The Australian National Audit Office has acknowledged the need to revisit the accountability framework in order to accommodate horizontal ways of working, but it’s not yet clear how far this would go.

Reports on experience in the Australian States and overseas have contended that for participatory governance to be effective, accountability and performance management arrangements will need to be adjusted so as to accommodate joint accountability and a clarification of horizontal accountabilities. Some reports have suggested that an effective legislative framework acknowledging joint accountability is needed.

Government through markets

Of all the new modes of policy implementation, government by market presents the most profound accountability challenges. In government by market state power is used to create or support a market that fulfils a public purpose, where that market would not exist in the private sector. Government by market provides an alternative means of implementing public policy, but it does not absolve a government from criticism for the consequences of poor market design or remove its accountability for the outcomes that are achieved.

Government by market allows for high levels of innovation because there are few procedures to follow once the broad market design has been put in place. However, transparency in relation to individual transactions is extremely low—it is impossible to monitor what millions of individuals are doing in response to the market, except in the aggregate. Over time, the stocks in a fishery or the amount of water in a catchment can be measured but it is impossible to hold individuals to account for every transaction in the market.  Accountability can only be applied to the market as whole, not to its parts.

Public servants can be held accountable for the quality of the market design, but the results of system-wide evaluations are usually only available some time after the event, often after all the officials responsible for the market design have left their positions, and in highly complex systems the evaluation may be ambiguous or uncertain because of unintended consequences or secondary effects in the system.

While government by market is a very effective technique for addressing some kinds of complex problems, there is also potential for significant gaps to emerge between community expectations about the underlying ethos or values that will be applied by participants in the market and the commercial pressures and history of those organisations.

New models of accountability

There is no single solution or methodology for dealing with the complexity of the new and emerging issues confronting governments; nor is one accountability or performance management approach able to accommodate all new modes of public policy implementation.

Accountability and performance management arrangements need to be taken into account in designing policy, because these influence how problems are understood and addressed.

Elaine Kamarck suggests that the different modes of policy implementation, or the way that governments choose to do things, and the accountability and performance regimes that accompany them, should be determined by the nature of the policy goals that the Government wants to pursue. If governments want consistency and security, they will choose a department or agency and apply a traditional accountability framework. If they want innovation and fit for purpose solutions to a known problem they will choose a network, and so on.

I referred earlier to a more diversified approach to accountability and performance management that we proposed in Delivering Performance and Accountability.  The booklet includes a table that attempts to relate policy goals to the new modes of policy implementation and the accountability challenges that they present.

The table is hard to read, but sets out policy objectives in terms of levels of innovation and consistency of product and then provides comment on the design of accountability and performance mechanisms for each of Kamarck modes of policy implementation.

There may well be issues that require responses which will use all three of Kamarck’s models for intervention at the same time.  Government responses to climate change, for example, include elements of performance managed bureaucracy, government by network and government by market.

This model does not require a wholesale replacement of the existing accountability and performance management frameworks, but a modification of the frameworks to take account of the decision-making context and the preferred mode of policy implementation.

In my view there should be a gradual, case-by-case approach in applying fit for purpose accountability and performance arrangements to specific programmes and policy initiatives.

Most of the proposed changes could be made by executive action. However, in some cases it would be necessary to support the changes with specific legislation, for example, when clarifying the nature of horizontal accountabilities or exempting officials from the application of existing accountability requirements.

The new modes of policy implementation make significant demands on the skills and capacity of public servants. Collaborative governance is difficult for a highly-trained specialist with technical knowledge not available to the people he or she may be working with. Public servants trained to operate within a hierarchical system of accountability and a simplified model of problem solving may need assistance in developing the skills required to manage group decision-making in a highly uncertain environment.

A continuing investment needs to be made in providing practical support for public servants dealing with intractable problems. New modes of public policy implementation require capabilities in problem framing and boundary setting, the ability to generate fresh thinking on intractable problems, methods for working across organisational and disciplinary boundaries, and techniques for effective decision-making in situations characterised by high levels of uncertainty. Public servants will need to tolerate rapid change in the way problems are defined and to engage stakeholders as joint decision-makers rather than as providers or recipients of services.

Not all public servants will need to work in these ways all the time, and some staff may not be affected at all.  But many public servants will be asked to deliver complex solutions in extremely short timeframes. Others will be confronted by ambiguous and complex problems at some point in their career.  And many more will be required to support or assist agencies struggling to find a way through new problems and to develop innovative ways of working.

It is important that the senior levels of the public service are able to exercise the kinds of leadership that these problems require.

Shared accountability?

The most radical way of reforming accountability arrangements to support new ways of working would be to transition to an accountability framework that acknowledges the pressures for shared decision-making power and funding authority through the development of collective accountability for joint governance, possibly through specific legislation acknowledging joint accountability for some programmes.

Governments and Parliaments understandably have some reservations about any move which would mean that the normal lines of accountability could not be traced to a single source. But joint accountability doesn’t necessarily mean that there is no ultimate point of accountability. A theoretical form of joint accountability already exists in the current financial framework, in the form of third party drawing rights. There is scope for more guidance material from central agencies, incidentally, to help public servants understand how this could work.

In the meantime, there are some potential paths to flexibility within the current accountability and performance management frameworks that can improve the public service’s capacity to deliver better services to Australians.

Conclusion

By way of conclusion, let me say that, while the current accountability and performance management arrangements were designed in a different era to support forms of policy implementation, they are still suitable for many of the issues dealt with by governments.  I am not suggesting that we need to give up on accountability and performance management, even for the most complex and ambiguous problems.

I am convinced, however, that if the Australian public service is to meet its future challenges, we need to refine our accountability systems so that they that are better suited to the needs of a diverse, informed and networked society, and look for different ways of assessing performance and using performance information.

Start of page

Australian Public Service Commission   A-Z index   Privacy, legal & copyright   Contact us
This page can be found at www.apsc.gov.au/media/briggs150709.htm