P27 Innovating public policy and Public service organizations
Panel Chairs
Corresponding chairs:
- Jenny Lewis, University of Melbourne. jmlewis@unimelb.edu.au
- Carrie Wright, Balsillie School of International Affairs. cwright@wlu.ca
Review chair:
- Azad Singh Bali, University of Melbourne. a.bali@unimelb.edu.au
Co-chairs:
- Giorgia Nesti, University of Padova
- Richard Walker, Lingnan University
- Angel Caglin, University of West Indies
Description of the panel
How do governments and societies attempt to solve policy problems? How do public sector organizations design innovation across the hierarchy? Do these attempts work? Governments are under pressure to try to solve multiple challenges by innovativing their policymaking processes and their public service organizations; however, public sector organizations face structural barriers to developing and scaling new solutions, such as risk-averse cultures, rigid hierarchies, fragmented accountability and the absence of incentives for experimentation that often restrict innovation. Policy (process and outcome) innovations — whether incremental or radical, fast or slow, local or transnational — do not reliably produce the intended effects, and we know surprisingly little about why some innovation succeeds, some have no effect, and some make problems worse.
Attempts to innovate might occur in the framing of problems, during the policy design and decision-making process, or during implementation and evaluation. Attempts to innovate might happen quickly (for example in the face of an emergency such as a pandemic or a natural disaster response) or take a long time to appear through many small changes that add up to large shifts (as in the ongoing reform of welfare systems). Innovations might either succeed or fail in achieving their intentions. A central but underexplored dimension of this puzzle is the architecture of innovation itself: who in the government hierarchy drives change, how roles and responsibilities are distributed across levels of the public service, and what processes and communication protocols allow frontline insight to inform strategic decisions.
The aim of the panel is to chronicle interesting and creative ways of dealing with common challenges that societies face, to extract the translatable insights that such cases can offer, and distil recurring elements and patterns. Papers that address the topic of innovating policy processes and outcomes and the structure of public sector organizations, are welcome, including:
- Conceptual and empirical papers that examine various approaches to innovative policy problem-solving, and solution-making
- Papers focused on the design and implementation of innovating public policy processes and outcomes and the structures of public sector organizations
- Empirical examples that explain both how innovative attempts to solve problems came about, and why they did or did not work in implementation. These should try and address some of the following questions.
- What types of innovation were used in attempts to solve policy problems?
- What is the locus of innovation — is it about policymaking (framing, design, implementation, evaluation), the public sector's processes and services, or the public sector's own governance, structure, and capacity?
- What roles, processes, and communication structures connect frontline workers, middle managers, and government decision-makers to design or scale innovation across the hierarchy?
- What do we know about the success and failure of innovation attempts? Did it achieve the desired outcome, make no difference, or make the problem worse?
- What societal impact did it have on policymaking and/or service delivery?
Relevance to the Conference theme
This panel is clearly aligned with the conference theme: Polycrisis, Wicked Problems and Grand Challenges: Public Administrations in Search of Safety and Security. The panel seeks papers that address the issue of the need to solve polycrises, wicked problems and grand challenges, as nations face problems that are “big” in scale, scope, frequency, the complexity of their policy subsystem, or the unevenness of their impacts across society. Declining trust in government has only sharpened the pressure to try to solve these problems and has led to a growing focus on the need for governments to be innovative in policymaking processes, in public service delivery, and in the public sector itself (its governance, structure, and capacity). This panel pays attention to the challenge of building institutional innovation capacity from within public systems. It will examine the governance architectures that manage the tension between centralized direction and decentralized experimentation — a tension that public administrators face across domains from health and social services to environmental governance and crisis response. We know surprisingly little about why some innovations succeed, some have no effect, and some make problems worse. The need to address this is crucial for public management. This panel aims to distil recurring elements and patterns of innovating public policy and public sector organizations to extract translatable insights.