Abstract
Claims that policy capacity has been eroded in the world of new public management have been widely canvassed. Yet these conceptualizations of policy capacity have mainly been linked to traditional and rationalist views of the policy process, where the focus is on content expertise for understanding the issue, analytical skills for generating viable options, and exercising authority and autonomy to implement the chosen policy. A second discourse on perceived policy capacity decline raises deeper challenges in relation to strategic policy work such as comprehension of ‘wicked’ policy challenges, and the need for forward-thinking, collective effort and political alignment capabilities. What is the range of skills needed for envisioning and communicating this ‘policy-for-the-future,’ as opposed to designing and implementing ‘policy-of-the-day?’ This chapter draws together research on the urban water policy responses of Australian capital cities to prolonged drought, in order to explore the policy capacity required for innovative policy making. The drought circumstances heightened policy activities and provided an opportunity to identify the policy capacity which featured in the strategic policy responses of the period, alongside the perceived capacity gaps which contributed to a missed opportunity for policy innovation. The results suggest that capability within both individual and organizational levels of the policy setting is required to produce a reinforced architecture for facilitating major policy change. In particular, capacity for gaining legitimacy for long-term policy outlooks, addressing the politicization of issues, and facilitating/managing diverse policy communities emerged as key themes in strategic policy work. By examining policy capacity characteristics and deficits for policy innovation, the chapter makes a first attempt at identifying key aspects of what might constitute forward-looking policy capacity in contemporary government.
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Bettini, Y., Head, B.W. (2018). Exploring Capacity for Strategic Policy Work: Water Policy in Australia. In: Wu, X., Howlett, M., Ramesh, M. (eds) Policy Capacity and Governance. Studies in the Political Economy of Public Policy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54675-9_13
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