When a social problem persists or a signature program fails to achieve its potential, it is common for those publicly responsible, such as the elected government, to seek to deflect blame by identifying a scapegoat. The media, and now social media (especially), join the hunt for someone to blame. This is usually complicated because every problem occupies the apex of a pyramid of causation populated by multiple actors, multiple points of vulnerability and multiple prior decisions.
A common feature of failed programs is the absence of an empowered individual who is accountable for results and is given the authority (power) to achieve them.
In the previous article, we classified the critical preconditions necessary for the successful delivery of a program or project — elements of a feasible path — into Passion, Powers, People, Knowledge and Purses. In this column, we will touch on the second. The capacity to discharge a function, implement a strategy or deliver a service embraces two main elements: coordinating authority and legal power.
Coordination
A coordinator or champion whose mandate is respected is foundational, because it, he, she or they can muster the other capacities if any are missing. The coordinator legitimises the enterprise, motivates the other stakeholders, acts as a conduit to higher authority and accepts responsibility for implementation.
A crucial task of champions is to scope the exercise and set administrative boundaries. They will encourage other stakeholders to align their own planning and budget processes to serve the shared mission. They will identify the best tools and persuade their custodians to bring them into service of the mission. It is not however essential that the coordinator exercise every one of the powers, for inevitably, in any arena of public health, many institutions will be involved and bridges must be negotiated across boundaries.
The champion must command sufficient respect to protect the enterprise from destabilisation by others with different interests to advance.
A common reason for the disempowerment of a manager within a state’s administrative apparatus is the involvement of the commonwealth in fields that are primarily within the state’s jurisdiction. The prospect of tapping or retaining a pipeline into commonwealth funding is a disincentive for any state to exercise its responsibilities in those fields where it is sovereign. When the commonwealth elbows into a distinct state function, the states’ accountability is reduced and months or years can pass as cost-shifting is alleged, contradicted, and then adjourned by an election in one jurisdiction or another.
Conversely, commonwealth officers with a broad national strategy to promote are commonly hamstrung by being obliged to step back from implementation. But for holistic, preventative public health, it is essential to harness the states’ involvement, because they are responsible for delivery through the hospital, education, sport and recreation systems, as well as local government’s functions such as local infrastructure.
Navigating state-federal jurisdictional boundaries adds complexity and puffs up the transaction costs but is commonly unavoidable because of the commonwealth’s all-pervasive budgetary supremacy. Officers in line departments commonly don’t have the authority to interact directly with the commonwealth without the involvement of the premier’s separtment and/or without prior ratification of protocols. Vertical fiscal inequality casts a shadow over all such negotiations: Treasury will want to keep a sharp eye on what is going on.
If the above seems somewhat abstract, Exhibit 1 is the snowballing debacle that the national response to the invasion of fire ants has become, exposed by the contemporary senate committee. It’s a looming massive threat to public health that could have been avoided with better coordination and better application of legal powers.
Legal powers
In a nation under the rule of law, every operative needs legal authority to conduct works, perform services, tread on land or expend public money. ‘Legal authority’ however does not necessarily mean statutory power. Certainly, statutory power is always necessary for coercive actions such as taxation and constraints on civil liberty, and the landholder’s permission is almost always necessary to occupy land. But most departments operate their administration under royal prerogative (a concept in common law) without specific statutory origin, as well as administering statutes that either convey or limit their powers to act. So ‘legal authority’ embraces prerogative, enabling and coercive powers.
State governments enjoy a general power of competence to improve the wellbeing of their populations, except where fettered by the national constitution, but that authority may be scattered through different portfolio departments and so be unavailable to operatives who need it at a particular place and time.
The power of line command
Line command is an immense advantage in delivering a function. Line command is a concept that bridges the power of a champion and legal power. It is most simply explained by referring to the ownership of a property asset. A landowner enjoys line command over works — development and maintenance — on their property and coordinates any activity by other parties. Line command is inevitably fettered by a higher regulatory power, or self-fettered by a sublease, but subject to that, property owners are sovereign.
Although a confident champion can in principle muster the other capacities without direct line control over them, line command, especially over staff and funds, adds greatly to the exercisable power. The fewer jurisdictional boundaries that have to be crossed and the fewer managers in other sections who have to be harnessed to the cause, the easier the coordinator’s task becomes. This particularly applies where real property or physical assets are to be managed.
Those providing services on the front line in public hospitals and health delivery have to contend with many overlays of management and extensive reporting obligations. These operate to annul or complicate line command. A perpetual challenge in public authorities is to allow sufficient line command for people to apply their passion and talents, but with sufficient mechanisms of accountability — for adherence to the authority’s mission, treatment of staff and citizens, and expenditure of public money.
Line command carries risks. Line command without adequate mechanisms for coordination with other sources of legal power or knowledge can induce hubris in a can-do manager who simply wants to break through ‘bureaucratic red tape’ to get things done. Ministers exercising line command over their departments are vulnerable to hubris. Hubris is conducive to institutional overreach and policy failure, an example being the peremptory shift of the headquarters of the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority to Armidale in 2016 despite industry and professional advice to the contrary, followed by an apparent collapse in governance.
The concept of line command can sound a clear warning against outsourcing. It is in tension with the concept of competition between multiple service providers, a principle dear to economics. Consider how much more complicated the delivery of NDIS has been made by outsourcing to multiple private firms. Coordination of activity at that scale requires a serious investment of ‘quality time’ and effort by experienced managers, thereby reducing the scope for savings compared with delivery by public officers.
Implications for policy
The analysis supports a revitalised Council of Australian Governments with funding discretion. It supports machinery of government, such as interdepartmental committees with executive capacity, that coordinate activity between otherwise separated participants. It supports the decentralisation of activity to regional and district offices in the interests of shorter chains of command and co-location of offices of different departments in geographic proximity. It supports delegating to local managers more extensive line command over their functions. It cautions against outsourcing to competing service providers, which more-or-less inevitably makes coordination more difficult.
READ MORE:
Prevention or patch-up? Some preconditions are essential for public policy
