Hurahura Research
Our research role
The Public Service Commission and the New Zealand public service are continually working to improve how public services deliver for New Zealanders. As we work on improving public services now, we must also keep an eye to the future, so that New Zealanders have a public service that better meets their needs and remains relevant in a changing world.
Part of the Commission’s core function is to provide leadership and over-sight of the public service and ensure the purpose of the Public Service Act is carried out. From time to time, Commission staff need to do a deeper dive to understand a problem. Sometimes this involves a literature review or empirical research and analysis. Other times it can involve engaging with public administration theory to develop new understandings, or reflective practice and insights.
This collection of papers have been commissioned, written or contributed to by Commission staff members in order for us to get a better understanding of various challenges facing the public service, so that we can continue to work on improving how public services deliver for New Zealanders. The Commission’s aim in sharing the papers here is to make these ideas and analyses available to a wider audience, and to inform and encourage public debate, with the ultimate aim of informing our work.
If you have any questions, would like reports in a different format or are interested in discussing this work, please email: info@publicservice.govt.nz.
Disclaimer: The views, opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in these papers are strictly those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of the Commission or the New Zealand Government.
Please note: Prior to August 2020, the Public Service Commission was known as the State Services Commission. Documents published prior to this date refer to the Commission by this earlier name.
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Public Service Principles - What are they and what do they mean for public servants
Hannah Cameron and Callum Butler of Te Kawa Mataaho Public Service Commission describe the new Public Service principles and explore what they’ll mean for the future Public Service.
When the going gets tough, the goal-committed get going: overcoming transactions costs of interagency collaborative governance
Collaborative governance, despite being a fraught endeavour, is sometimes the only option for addressing cross-agency problems.
Trust and Resilience: How Public Service Principles Encouraged Compliance with COVID-19 Public Health Guidelines in New Zealand
In fall 2020, the IBM Center for The Business of Government initiated a Challenge Grant Competition soliciting essays from academics and practitioners describing how government can best transform the way it works, operat…
Institutional Memory as Storytelling: How Networked Government Remembers
How do bureaucracies remember? The conventional view is that institutional memory is static and singular, the sum of recorded files and learned procedures. Drawing on four policy examples from four sectors (housing, ener…
Pursuing the public interest
What does it mean to pursue the public interest? This idea sits at the heart of the Public Service Act 2020. Rodney Scott, Associate Professor at the University of New South Wales and Kaitohutohu Mātāmua Chief Policy Adv…
Drawing new boundaries: Can we legislate for administrative behaviour?
A central question of public administration is how public administrators make decisions within organisational frames and context. Public administrators cannot and do not make purely rational decisions based on means-ends…
Spirit of Service speech
Introductory lecture on Te hāpai hāpori – a spirit of service to the community for ANZSOG course Managing Public Sector Organisations.
Collaborative Governance and System Dynamics Modelling: What do clients want
This chapter reports on group decision making in the context of public policy design and implementation and explores which outcomes are important to potential clients in the New Zealand public sector.
Determined to succeed: Can goal commitment sustain interagency collaboration?
Governments have struggled with addressing problems that cross agency boundaries. Since 2012, the New Zealand Government has achieved significant success by holding groups of agencies collectively responsible for achievi…
Making sense of New Zealand’s ‘spirit of service’: social identity and the civil service
This paper explores the creation a more unified civil service in New Zealand with the Public Service Act 2020, which promotes the most profound changes to the public service since New Zealand’s New Public Management heyd…
Public Service Reform – the challenges ahead
A keynote speech by Hugo Vitalis (then Acting Deputy Commissioner, Strategy and Policy, State Services Commission) at the 2019 Public Sector Conference, Wellington.
Innovations in governance – developing collective accountability in New Zealand
This paper examines how formal collective accountability can help bind agencies together. As a leader in the New Public Management reforms of the 1980s and 90s, New Zealand divided its public sector into a large number o…
Public service motivation and social identity
This paper considers some possible implications of social identity for public administration, with particular regard to joined-up government, integrity, and performance.
Service, Citizenship, and the Public Interest: New Public Service and our public service reforms
This report summarises the New Public Service paradigm as it might apply to the New Zealand public service.
How “independence” drives governance and form choices – a draft framework for future practice
This paper seeks to bring together some apparently disparate ideas about “independence” across a range of government roles and activities, such as policy, administrative decision-making, regulation and oversight, to supp…
Does ethnicity affect trust in public services?
To be effective, public institutions need to be trusted widely, by citizens across differing socioeconomic backgrounds. The Kiwis Count survey measures New Zealanders’ trust in public services.
Organising for complex problems – beyond contracts, hierarchy and markets
Conference paper This paper proposes a heuristic device for the selection and use of network forms that begins to illustrate some of the changes to the performance management framework that would be needed to effectively…
A comparison of management adaptations for joined‐up government: Lessons from New Zealand
This paper explores the conditions that may have enabled the most progress and possible management adaptations when these initial conditions are not fully met.
Group Model Building: Using Systems Dynamics to Achieve Enduring Agreement
This book describes the cognitive and interpersonal effects of group model building, and presents empirical research on what group model building achieves and how.
A new economics of public services Lessons from using targets and quasi markets in the UK and New Zealand
A new economics of public services Lessons from using targets and quasi markets in the UK and New Zealand
Authors: Rodney Scott, Gwyn Bevan
Format: Working paper
Date published: 1…
Singular memory or institutional memories? Towards a dynamic approach
In this article, we distinguish between two different ways of thinking about institutional memory: one “static” and one “dynamic.”
Interagency collaboration to reduce crime in New Zealand
This short video case study describes the efforts of the New Zealand Justice Sector to reduce crime and criminal reoffending between 2012 and 2016.
Interpersonal Success Factors for Strategy Implementation: A Case Study Using Group Model Building
A case study using validated survey methods yielded promising results, and suggests that further study is needed. This application of group model building may be a manifestation of the IKEA affect, where individuals valu…
Explaining how group model building supports enduring agreement
System dynamics models are typically used to simulate the behaviour of the problem system under discussion environment, to help understand and solve complex problems. This paper creates a combined model that links the fi…
Interagency Performance Targets: A Case Study of New Zealand’s Results Programme
From 2012 to 2017, the New Zealand government has held groups of senior public servants collectively responsible for achieving performance targets for improving persistent crosscutting problems. In this report, Rodney Sc…