From Complexity to Collaboration: Creating the New Zealand we want for ourselves, and enabling future generations to do the same for themselves

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to change how we approach public policy and implementation for complex problems such as child poverty. The ultimate objective of public policy is to improve people’s lives and wellbeing, now and into the future. Traditional environmental, social and economic policies are clearly failing to generate the changes needed to address the persistent and increasing disadvantage facing many people and the communities they live in. This is unacceptable in a country as rich in human and natural resources as Aotearoa New Zealand. We propose a principles-based policy framework for complex social problems such child poverty. This approach will do more than embellish existing policy. It will help ensure that the intent of policy is realised, through a shared and explicit understanding and a commitment to achieving significant improvements. The government needs to rethink its various roles and consider how it enables local communities to be more transformative for children, their families, whānau and communities. We arrive at this conclusion through an analysis of how complex problems and uncertainty are best managed, and through considering some promising practices which suggest some common underpinning values and practices we can follow. In essence, we propose that the design and implementation process for public policy should be reconfigured to rest on a new set of principles, built on values of trust between government and other agents of change, and of valuing distributed community knowledge, resources and local solutions. This paper derives the following set of six principles from our understanding of the complexity of issues like child poverty, and from our consideration of previous attempts to work effectively in complex policy domains. The Government’s proposed legislation to set targets for ‘significant and sustained’ child poverty reduction, and the elevated focus of government agencies on effective interventions and on learning from locally-generated change, make the time ripe for advancing our thinking on these issues.