In their seminal work on policy implementation, Pressman and Wildavsky
(1973:143) have argued that 'there is no point in having good ideas if they
cannot be carried out.' The use of a New Public Management (NPM) service
delivery approach in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) health area,
referred to as the Purchaser Provider Model (PPM), was seen as one of
those good ideas. The then-ACT Government hoped that the use of this
model as part of its public policy reform agenda would assist it in successfully
achieving its goal of restraining the growth of ACT public health care costs.
The PPM was in operation between 1996 and 2002, when it was
discontinued, suggesting a policy implementation failure.
In this thesis, the PPM is used as a case study as a basis for supporting the
argument that the administrative architecture through which public policy is
implemented plays a crucial part in the success or otherwise of the
implementation of that policy, especially in the area of public service delivery.
The administrative architecture is defined as, the administrative components
that have been designed to assist the implementation of public policy.
To undertake the analysis the PPM is expressed in terms of the following
three extremely important components of the administrative architecture:
- the configuration of role and role relationships;
- resource allocation arrangements; and
- the performance management framework.
Pattern matching logic in conjunction with the literature is used to show how
crucial was the part played by the above components and hence the
administrative architecture in the implementation of public policy.
While the thesis provides compelling evidence (based on the case study and
the academic literature) to support its claim, the crucial part played by the
administrative architecture in the implementation of public policy, especially
in the area of service delivery, has hitherto received little attention in the
implementation literature.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/258930 |
| Date | January 2009 |
| Creators | Collins, James Patrick, n/a |
| Publisher | University of Canberra. Government |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | ), Copyright James Patrick Collins |
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