Promoting strengths, prevention, empowerment, and community change through organizational development: lessons for research, theory, and practice

SPEC Learning and Changing by Doing is a three-year, action research, and organizational change project designed to ultimately promote social justice and well-being in the community. SPEC is an acronym that stands for Strengths, Prevention, Empowerment, and Community Change. The project consists of five organizations tackling internal organizational change in order to better promote justice and well-being in their respective constituencies. In this article we present a formative evaluation of this multicase study of organizational change in human services. This article contributes to the empirical and theoretical literature on organizational change in the nonprofit human service milieu.     

Backloading to extinction: Coping with values conflict in the administration of Australia's federal biodiversity offset policy

Policy-makers are frequently required to consider and manage conflicting public values. An example of this in the environmental domain is biodiversity offset policy, which governments worldwide have adopted as a mechanism to balance environmental protection with socio-economic development. However, little work has examined administrative practices underpinning biodiversity offset policy implementation, and how the adoption of coping strategies to manage value conflicts may influence resulting policy outcomes. This study fills this research gap using a case study of Australia's federal biodiversity offset policy under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act 1999. Using data from 13 interviews of federal policy administrators, I show that the introduction of a new policy in 2012 enabled a shift from the use of precedent to a technical approach for setting offset requirements under the EPBC Act. Yet, multiple sources of policy ambiguity remain, and administrators have adopted post-approval condition-setting, or ‘backloading’—a form of cycling, facilitated by structural separation—to defer detailed assessments of offset requirements until after biodiversity losses are approved. Backloading thus undermines the effectiveness of environmental policy and will persist as coping strategy unless policy ambiguity is reduced via legislative amendments and adequate resourcing of biodiversity conservation.

Points for practitioners

• Biodiversity offset policy requires administrators to manage conflicting environmental and socioeconomic values.
• Technical decision tools reduce reliance on case-by-case decision-making, but multiple ambiguities persist.
• Backloading (post-approval condition-setting) defers values conflict, but reduces transparency, accountability, and policy effectiveness.
• Policy ambiguity must be reduced at the political level to facilitate effective biodiversity conservation.