Looking beyond service delivery: why relationships matter in policy design

Are governments making the most of the partnerships they have built with communities, not-for-profits, social enterprises and other organisations to help address complex social and economic challenges?

Not according to ANZSOG Academic Fellow Professor Jo Barraket AM, whose research finds that these relationships are often engaged too late in the policy process and fail to add value to policy design.

At the Behind Public Outcomes: The relationships and networks that make government work ANZSOG Thought Leadership event on 27 August, Professor Barraket explored growing interest within governments in relational public management and what the concept means for governments seeking to create public value through collaboration.

Across a range of research and case studies, a common theme emerged: achieving better public outcomes requires more than engaging stakeholders during implementation. It requires governance arrangements that bring community knowledge, practitioner expertise and lived experience into policy design, learning and evaluation.

Drawing on research into social procurement, employment services reform and the not-for-profit sector, she argued that while diverse forms of expertise are frequently incorporated into service delivery they are being overlooked during policy design.

“Recognise the public value of diverse expertise in the design and feedback loops of policy, not just in public service delivery,” she said.

“We’ve seen that a lot of potential gets left on the table when relationality stops and starts at service delivery and doesn't actually come up to the level of policy design."

She said that many public systems and processes remained shaped by transactional ways of working, despite government attempts at adopting partnership, co-design and collaborative approaches in recent decades.

She discussed examples from across her research and policy work, to illustrate this.

In Victoria, Australia, and Scotland governments are increasingly seeking to create broader social value through public spending. Professor Barraket noted that while these policies aim to connect economic and social objectives, challenges can emerge when organisations expected to deliver social outcomes have limited opportunities to inform policy design or provide feedback as implementation begins.

Her experience with the development of the National Not-for-Profit Sector Development Blueprint highlighted both the importance of the not-for-profit sector to Australia’s economy and democracy, and the difficulties of building genuinely collaborative relationships while organisations continue to operate within short-term funding and competitive procurement environments.

In the case of employment services reform there is a strong potential contribution from social enterprises in providing more relational forms of support for people facing complex barriers to employment. However, she cautioned that governments need to be careful not to absorb alternative provider models into existing systems in ways that diminish the distinctive capabilities that make them valuable in the first place.

“Government, in taking on these relational approaches, is sometimes seeking to bring in the ‘secret sauce’ of different provider types. But then in doing so, they bring them into dominant systems without doing that intermediary work and boundary spanning, and end up actually bashing that ‘secret sauce’ out of them.”

During the discussion, Professor Barraket suggested that governments could strengthen relational approaches by drawing more deliberately on citizen experience and community expertise. As she noted, a key question to be asked at the beginning of any project is how governments determine success in the first place.

“Why doesn’t government talk more to the citizenry and users of these services, and their lived expertise, about what constitutes winning? Rather than making determinations while being very distant from the real-world experience of those services.”

Watch the video

Watch Professor Jo Barraket’s session on relational public management and the role of the social economy in public governance below.

Professor Jo Barraket AM is Director of the Melbourne Social Equity Institute at the University of Melbourne and an ANZSOG Academic Fellow. Her fellowship explores relational public management and the role of the social economy in creating public value.