4 Structures
Effective management systems require an institutional design that provides for both sound systems and organisational structures. Structures are usually seen purely as the organisational forms utilised to deliver services. In thinking about the New Zealand public management system it is also important to recognise that such a definition is too narrow and needs to include less tangible structures, including: the Cabinet; Ministerial relations – as evidenced by the use of portfolios; vote structures; and the role Parliament and its officers play in the wider system.
4.1 Roles and Responsibilities
The New Zealand public management system incorporates a number of different actors with different roles and responsibilities. The relationships between these different levels of government has tended to be discussed in terms of hierarchical and accountability relationships. This will largely be appropriate, after all the Executive and the State sector do need to be accountable to citizens (through Parliament) for the use of taxpayers’ funds. However, in looking towards a managing for outcomes environment it may be that the ways in which accountability is provided, or the relationships between the Executive and agencies will need to be amended to assist in creating a learning environment.
4.2 Machinery of Government principles
The State Services Commission (1999) has identified three machinery of government principles for organisational design. These focus on effectiveness and efficiency, risk management, and constitutional conventions.
A potential failing of these principles is that they do not provide for consideration of how less tangible structural arrangements (for example, vote structures) should be constructed. Boston et al (1996) suggest that decisions about machinery of government design in the early period of the State sector reforms were guided by eight objectives which may assist in determining a set of base principles that can support more than organisational design choices. These are:
- Maximise allocative and productive efficiency;
- Reduce the range of state functions under direct ministerial control;
- Ensure clear lines of managerial and political accountability;
- Ensure that all organisations have a clear mission and that inconsistent objectives are transparent, and ideally, the responsibility of separate organisations;
- Ensure high-quality, contestable policy advice across all sectors;
- Minimise the risk of bureaucratic, provider or regulator capture;
- Ensure good horizontal coordination; and
- Improve the bureaucratic representation of disadvantaged or poorly represented groups (p. 81).
A common theme of the objectives identified by Boston et al (1996) is the need to allow for transparency of activity and separation of policy and service delivery activities. This transparency was largely perceived as a benefit because it would assist in specifying outputs (in part for accountability purposes), but also because it would support a clear focus on individual interventions. It may be, however, that this focus on transparency and separation of activities has contributed to what is currently perceived as “fragmentation” in the New Zealand public management system.
If this is the case (and the following section looks at issues that impact upon coordination of resources in the New Zealand model), then it may be appropriate to revisit the core machinery of government principles so that they have a greater focus on coordination of and collaboration in policy formation and service delivery. Reshaping the principles identified by Boston et al to allow for this focus might result in principles such as:
- ensuring that all organisations are working towards common, and non-conflicting, outcomes;
- providing for good coordination of policy advice and delivery of interventions;
- ensuring high quality policy advice; and
- maximising effective and efficient service delivery.
