Table of Contents
Over 40 years ago the spotlight was put on gathering scholarly interest on policy implementation with the publication of Pressman and Wildavsky’s (1973) seminal book on Implementation: How Great Expectations in Washington Are Dashed in Oakland. [1] In its slipstream came Bardach’s (1977) Implementation Game outlining the myriad ways in which policy initiatives could be diverted, deflected, dissipated, and delayed. Despite his pessimism about the promise of big policy solutions more generally, and the prospects for improving implementation in particular, Bardach nevertheless suggested creating capabilities related to implementation in two institutional locations for the purpose of ‘game-fixing’: in staff policy analysis and evaluation units in pertinent department budget offices and, in an environment of policy-capable US legislatures, in policy or appropriation committees with low turnover in staff and representatives. There, he speculated, officials might have the incentive, perspective, expertise, and resources to mitigate dysfunctional implementation dynamics.
40 years later, in very different institutional contexts, the leaders of governments in several jurisdictions – the United Kingdom, Australia, and Queensland – have created ‘implementation’ or ‘delivery’ units at the centre, ostensibly to advise, monitor and ensure better implementation of policy initiatives. In the UK, the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit was established by Prime Minister Tony Blair government in the Cabinet Office in 2001. In Australia, a Cabinet Implementation Unit was installed by Prime Minister John Howard in the Commonwealth’s Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet in 2003, and an Implementation Unit was established in March 2004 in the Queensland Department of Premier and Cabinet under Premier Peter Beattie.
The emergence of policy implementation units is intriguing, if only because they seem to have been at the instigation of prime ministers and premiers, and not the result of a recent call by policy scholars to build new capacities. Indeed, although implementation analysis has long been a staple in the tool-kit taught in graduate policy programs and textbooks, and should be an essential feature of decision briefs prepared for ministers, arguably the implementation literature has lost considerable profile and steam, with a small band of insightful contributors refining and elaborating theoretical propositions (Hill and Hupe 2002). Relatively little attention has been paid to question of capacity and doing better at making initiatives work in ever more complex policy environments. This, of course, has been a top concern of political leaders, who have adopted new performance regimes, the language of the New Public Management, and project management techniques to ensure priority initiatives are realized. Against this backdrop, the emergence and nomenclature of policy implementation units, however intriguing, seems like a throwback – one would have thought that the wave of such units would have hit in the 1980s in response to the original insights of Bardach, Pressman, Wildavsky, and many others writing at that time.
This chapter explores the emergence, roles, functions and accomplishments of policy implementation and delivery units, as well as their prospects. It does not argue that such units should be established as a feature of modern central government, but rather, that their emergence is worthy of note and understanding. Proceeding under the auspices of first ministers, these capabilities can be seen as a critique of existing management, implementation, and monitoring capabilities of the larger governance and public service systems where policy priorities are concerned, and the latest instrument unsheathed by some first ministers to design, assist and embed critical policy initiatives. But policy implementation units join the panoply of different capabilities leaders have experimented with to drive policy agendas and coordinate government activities, and, in the modern era, where policy is often recognised as inherently complex, share some similarities with capabilities intended to manage horizontal and whole-of-government initiatives. Indeed, a key goal of this collection is to ascertain what policy implementation units actually do, and whether they will endure, recognising that capabilities with the same names may play completely different roles in different systems, presumably reflecting the ecology of their respective institutional environments and the strategic needs of their progenitors.
The cases considered in this chapter (Richards and Smith, 2005; Wanna, 2005; Tiernan, 2005) reflected the universe of known ‘named’ policy implementation units in late 2005. [2] Despite the preponderance of Westminster systems serving as backdrop for these cases (with the exception of the European Union case), they have considerable diversity with respect to the motivations of political leaders who established them, the bureaucratic capabilities and roles that were installed, and the governance environments in which they have operated (unitary, federal, and multi-level governance). This chapter seeks to provide a framework for analysing and assessing the work of these units to date. It begins by with a brief synopsis of the evolution of thinking on implementation, and then considers the new environment for governance, policy development, and implementation. Against this backdrop, the chapter casts policy implementation and delivery units as one of several ‘adhocracies’ that populate the centre of government (Desveaux, Lindquist, and Toner, 1994; Lindquist, 2004), and distinguishes among different functions because, despite their labels, implementation units may take on quite different roles and could be seen as rival capabilities and processes to other central capabilities. The chapter then provides an overview of the case studies and key findings. It provides a preliminary analysis of the patterns of these units, seeks to explain their arrival and mandate, and considers whether functional equivalents might exist in other jurisdictions. The chapter identifies lessons for establishing central implementation units and concludes by considering the prospects for these units and calling for more engagement with scholars on these developments.