Integrated Impact Assessment as Environmental Policy: The New Zealand Experiment

The scope, complexity and interrelatedness of environmental problems presents a difficult challenge to policymakers. To date, public policies have been responsive largely to particular matters of public concern. They have typically been ad hoc, sectoral and segmental. Their administration has been charged to various agencies, each with its special mission. In consequence, governments have often acted to cross purposes; small results have often been ineffectual and, as often, unnecessarily expensive. Incremental innovation is seldom able to affect significantly the tendencies of the larger system of public policy and administration within which it is undertaken. Inasmuch as no country has had long experience with administration of environmental policy, a comparison of different approaches to environmental problems is useful. Direct transfers of method from one country to another may seldom be practicable, yet there may be lessons learned from the diverse experience of governments addressing similar problems. A comprehensive and radical institutional experiment in environmental policy has been initiated in the government of New Zealand. The New Zealand experiment may illuminate the effects of institutional structure on the implementation of policy. The relationships between constitutional principles, policy priorities and administrative structures have never been clear. The problems of coping with multiple environmental trends, their causes and their consequences justify efforts to find more effective methods of policymaking.     

The Impact of Proportional Representation on Government Effectiveness: The New Zealand Experience

It is often claimed that proportional representation (PR) undermines government effectiveness, including decisional efficacy, fiscal prudence, electoral responsiveness and accountability. Drawing on New Zealand's experience since the introduction of a mixed-member proportional (MMP) electoral system in 1996, this article examines the impact of the new voting system on government effectiveness. Although government durability has been substantially reduced and the policy-making process has become more complex, governments under MMP appear to be no less able to address major policy problems or respond to changing economic circumstances. Moreover, New Zealand has maintained continuous fiscal surpluses under MMP — a radical departure from the protracted, and often large, deficits that characterised the previous two decades under a majoritarian electoral system.     

A New Zealand Tragedy: Problems of Political Responsibility

New Zealand's state sector reforms, designed to enhance accountability and efficiency, have attracted considerable international attention. However, an unprecedented tragedy in April 1995 involving the deaths of 14 young people, and which resulted from the failings of the department of conservation, has raised doubts about whether the reforms actually clarified or clouded issues of political and managerial responsibility.     

Lesson-Drawing from New Zealand and Covid-19: The Need for Anticipatory Policy Making

The Covid-19 pandemic has seen most governments worldwide having to think on their feet rather than implementing detailed and well-rehearsed plans. This is notwithstanding the fact that a pandemic was bound to happen, sooner or later (and will happen again). The effectiveness of national responses has varied enormously. Globally, New Zealand has been perceived as setting the gold standard in ‘curve crushing’, and for a short period achieved Covid-free status. For this achievement, much credit is due to the New Zealand government, especially to Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern. However, post-lockdown the New Zealand government has encountered a number of Covid policy implementation problems (many of which could have been anticipated). Nevertheless, Covid-19 might still turn out to have been a seismic shock to existing policy processes and policy frames (such as austerity). If so, there are grounds for hope that in the future, governments and voters might be less short-term in their outlook. Perhaps anticipatory, rather than reactive policy making, might become more fashionable?     

Trajectories of Arts and Culture Policy in New Zealand

This article examines how arts and culture policy has been discussed since the 1960s in New Zealand, showing how it has increasingly been coupled with the construction of national identity. It also suggests that the rhetoric of the current Labour government marks a significant change. Against the traditional understanding of arts and culture as public and cultural goods, whose vital ‐ if intangible ‐ benefits justify the inevitable economic cost, since 1999 they have been fundamentally re‐imagined as contributing to a cohesive society ‐ through the fostering of “national identity” ‐ and also to a dynamic economy ‐ through the creation of jobs. This change is seen as an element of “third‐way” politics, and is argued to limit dangerously the sort of art that can be funded and valued.     

The Use of Contracting in the Public Sector—Recent New Zealand Experience

This research note examines the expanding use of contracting within the public sector in New Zealand. The term 'contracting' is interpreted broadly to include both external contracting (ie outsourcing) as well as the use of more explicit or formal 'contracts' within and between public sector organisations. No attention is given here to the separate, albeit related, processes of corporatisation, commercialisation and full privatisation (ie asset sales and the termination of public funding as well as provision). The empirical data, although limited, suggest that the recent increase in contracting in New Zealand has brought significant gains in terms of fiscal savings, productive efficiency, consumer choice and managerial accountability. Recent trends, however, have also posed some important policy issues, among them the limits to contracting out and the potential dangers associated with 'hollow' government.     

Policy-making in a Restructured State: The Case of the 1991 Health Reform Policy in New Zealand

The pressure for efficiency and accountability that led to reform of public institutions worldwide has had implications for public policy-making as well as the management of public services. The difficulties of providing a coordinated and efficient policy process that can respond to the requirements of a more managerialist style of government were evident in New Zealand in the 1980s and early 1990s. The policy process in 1990–91 leading to the introduction of health reform proposals provides an illuminating case study of the tension between participation and speed, and between traditional pluralist and managerialist approaches to policy development. The implications of this for subsequent implementation are discussed.     

The Influence of Political Parties on Policy Coordination

Despite an increasing interest in party‐state relations, the functions political parties as organizations fulfill in the government apparatus are rarely theorized or empirically examined. Instead of focusing on citizen demands toward parties, this article focuses on the demands of government. It argues that party organizational linkages help integrate an increasingly complex government apparatus. To substantiate this claim, it analyzes the impact of party linkages on policy coordination within and across subnational governments in the United States, Canada, and Switzerland. The analysis shows that: (1) the extent to which processes within different policy fields are connected—policy integration—is shaped by the relative strength of party organizational linkages rather than being a mere reflection of institutional divisions and (2) depending on the party configurations predominantly governing at the subnational level, policy integration within subnational governments either facilitates intergovernmental policy coordination or accelerates cross‐jurisdictional conflict between them.     

Struggling with Integrated Environmental Policy: The EPA Experience

Because of the interrelating, cross-media character of many environmental problems, development of comprehensive and coherent policies for their abatement or management is difficult. This is particularly true where, as in the United States, there has been a strong tendency to focus on single issues of complex problems. Nowhere is this problem of policy and program integration more difficult than in the Environmental Protection Agency. This article uses the lead contamination issue to illustrate the obstacles to integration of policy and procedure even for a single environmental pollutant. Given the holistic and ramifying character of environmental problems, how can appropriate policies and regulations be developed in a political system characterized by sectoral, specialized structure and special interest clientele? At the time of this writing, the effects of elevating the EPA to a cabinet level department cannot fully be foreseen. The expansion of EPA to the administration of nonregulatory responsibilities will doubtless bring new problems of policy to this agency. Problems of program integration may increase unless EPA is authorized to devise and adapt more effective integrative procedures.     

养老产业政策体系及其协调性--基于政策文本的量化分析

发展养老产业是应对未来深度老龄化的重要国家战略。聚焦养老产业政策体系,构建其协调性分析框架,选取调查2006—2018年中央、陕西省及安康市的资料,分析国家、省、市三级层面现行养老产业政策文本,应用MAXQDA软件对其进行编码,采用文本内容分析、共词分析、社会网络分析与聚类分析方法,对养老产业政策层级、政策发展历程、政策主体、政策效力、政策专项性、政策内容等进行双维协调性定量分析。研究发现:养老产业政策体系内部不同层级之间政策联系紧密,涉及的政策各要素较为完备,但仍然存在纵向、横向维度中的不协调因素。应通过丰富养老产业政策类型与内容、优化体系结构、加强相关部门合作等有效措施,进一步提升养老产业政策体系的协调性,为推动养老产业的健康可持续发展奠定制度基础。     

Free Market Experiments in the Laboratory of Democracy: The Long Decade of Policy Reform in New Zealand those risks

Books reviewd in this essay:
Christine Cheyne, Mike O'Brien and Michael Belgrave, Social Policy in Aotearoa New Zealand: A Critical Introduction
Brian Easton, The Commercialisation of New Zealand
Paul Dalziel and Ralph Lattimore, The New Zealand Macroeconomy: A Briefing on the Reforms
RC Mascarenhas, Government and the Economy in New Zealand
Raymond Miller (ed.), New Zealand Politics in Transition
Geoffrey Palmer and Michael Palmer, Bridled Power: New Zealand Government Under MMP     

New public management reform in New Zealand: The collective strategy phase

This paper examines the New Public Management movement in New Zealand. Specifically the focus is on the financial management of central government departments and the shift in emphasis from management in the public sector to management of the public sector, that is, from defining management in terms of where it takes place to defining it in terms of the nature and outcome of the task.     

New Zealand

European Journal of Political Research -     

New Zealand

European Journal of Political Research -