OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT

Operations management

Operations Management

Introduction

Internationally, a growing array of government strategies focuses on “community building”, “community strengthening”, “neighbourhood effects” and local/regional development (. There has, however, been little study of how such ideas and practices have emerged and been melded into the existing public policy and public administration arrangements. This paper examines the emergence of community focused policy making. The principle focus is, on articulating a narrative of how innovation in public administration can be conceptualised and implemented. Using an example of almost a decade of community focused innovation the article shows how the community approach was made politically supportable and administratively implementable with place acting as a central facilitating feature. In particular, the authors' experience of working in and advising an innovative administration provides insights into how place-based innovations received political authorisation and how administrative instruments for practical implementation were created (Radnor, 2008, 3).

Discussion

Taking the example of Australia, five years ago Australia had no departments with something like “Community Development” in their title. Now, we have five plus a couple of units within larger line agencies. Furthermore, community instruments have found their way into most social as well as some economic and physical infrastructure agencies. Approaches, however, differ widely with some governments making community a central focus and others still seeing it as largely a product and instrument of social welfare. This study focuses on one Australian State, Victoria, which has had the strongest authorising environment for community-focussed, place-based innovations (Lodge, 2008, 49).

Australian Governments have been drawn to the use of community-based instruments by four related drivers. Two may be seen as primarily originating in politics and two in policy. The political origins have been associated with a decline in trust of governments by citizens. The first factor in this was that during the 1990s policies which cut spending and withdrew services made government appear “mean and tricky”. The second political factor was that because of this increasing distance between electors and their representatives, politicians began to feel that they were unable to “read the pulse” of the electorate. This was evident in election defeats of parties and candidates who had seemed safe only a few weeks before polling (Krings, 2006, 12).

Design and Planning of transformation processes

Establishing the authorising environment for change required establishing the ideas behind it as publicly powerful. The Victorian Government brought Putnam to Melbourne on a speaking tour and his arguments about the power of strong communities with high rates of volunteering and numerous social and recreational clubs and associations gained significant coverage in the local media. This did not of itself establish the concepts or translate them into the words which would allow the new policy directions to resonate with local decision makers, administration officials and the public. Two sets of language with potential for this were already at least partly in the public domain: social capital and community development. The social capital language was rejected almost immediately because it was simply too opaque and distant from reality to resonate with the ...