25 years helping public servants through the policy maze: The Australian Policy Handbook
The Australian Policy Handbook: A Practical Guide to the Policymaking Process is a trusted guide to the public policymaking process. First published in 1998, the seventh edition was released recently, continuing a long tradition of both practical and academic advice for policy practitioners and students in Australia and internationally. The latest edition features new material on the contestable nature of modern policy advice, policy making amid local and global disruption, commissioning and contracting, public engagement and policy success and failure. It also includes new visuals and introduces a series of case studies for the first time.
Here the two newest authors, Sarah Ball and David Threlfall, spoke to Glyn Davis and Peter Bridgman, the original authors, and Catherine Althaus, co-author since the fourth edition in 2007, about their reflections on the evolution of the Handbook over its lifetime.
David: Where did the idea for the book come from?
Glyn: The Handbook was written within and for the Queensland Office of the Cabinet as a how to guide for new staff—around late 1995. Peter led the process. It was used only briefly: a change of government saw the Office of the Cabinet abolished in early 1996.
[Around this time] I had returned to Griffith University. To my surprise, however, there were regular requests from public servants for access, and news of samizdat copies floating around government.
Sarah: an article of Peter and Glyn’s takes us right back to that Queensland policy world of the mid 1990s. In your words:
‘Glyn took a call… from a somewhat panicked graduate trainee in Queensland Health. Though she had never studied politics, policy or administration, the trainee had been instructed to ‘write a food nutrition strategy for Queensland quickly’ to meet an overdue intergovernmental obligation. The most junior, inexperienced person had just been handed this daunting task, and she could find no departmental or academic publication to help. She did stumble on a public policy textbook [Glyn had co-authored], but it just said policy is complex and political. So she turned to one of its authors hoping for some practical hints.’ – p.98 in Bridgman and Davis, “What use is a policy cycle? Plenty, if the aim is clear.” Australian Journal of Public Administration 62.3 (2003): 98-102.
Peter: Exactly right. Meantime I was still in government and fielding queries from within my own department and across departmental divides for how best to develop policy, especially in legislative form. Drafting legislation remains one of the more complex policy tasks entrusted to public servants.
Glyn: When we decided to write a commercial version, we designed a whole new structure and the central motif of a policy cycle. We also brought in some academic content which would have been out of place in the Queensland government document. So the first edition, published in 1998, drew on the lessons from government but had no common text with the original internal document.
Sarah: What led to joining the project, Catherine?
Catherine: I was part of the brainstorming for the very first edition, when I would sit in Peter’s office (while Glyn was head of Premier and Cabinet) with his whiteboard and bounce ideas around. When the invitation came to participate for the 4th edition I saw it as an opportunity to be part of refuting the notion that there is a “single way” of doing policymaking, instead outlining more of a heuristic approach, featuring the learning component of policy processes and the role of public servants/students/scholars using their own judgement and skills to figure out what works well for their circumstances.
David: Why do you think the book remains so relevant?
Peter: Policy work is largely practical. While academic programs are more common now than in 1995, academic linkages to lived experience are uncommon. The book is unashamedly about the practice of public policy, including the confounding interplay with politics and administration. Its relevance remains this: it is an entry into the real world.
Catherine: The ideas of the Handbook are still relevant today because they provide a baseline (from the time of colonial Australian history) that still informs the current systems and institutions of Australian governance from which users can arc away.
Sarah: In what ways has the book changed between editions?
Peter: As theories of policy have developed, especially of policy analysis and instrument choice, the book has deepened and solidified. The first edition was written in the early Howard years, when federal government was still in the policy shadow of Hawke and Keating. Seven changes of Prime Minister later the experience of policy has shifted and the volume reflects that in its case studies and observations of policy process. Nevertheless there is a stable core to public policy. Even when governments eschew public service involvement in policy making, public servants’ duty to inform and to maintain the stable core of the body politic remains, especially through robust policy processes. It is unsurprising that much of the book has also been stable.
Catherine: And yet there have also been many shifts over the editions. We became more inclusive, slowly adding in new perspectives and opening up readers to the ideas that there are many models out there, many new important interpretations and approaches that need to become embedded into Australian policymaking. Whilst there is more to be done in this space, the slow gentle inclusion of feminist, Indigenous, and younger generations as well as multi-method acknowledgements exhibit a feature of Australian policymaking which is its beneficial pragmatism: we care about things that work on the ground.
David: What are the most important additions?
Glyn: In my view the case studies from later editions, and particularly the extended ANZSOG material from this most recent edition, are the most important addition. They help ground the text in practical examples, and bring each stage of the cycle to life.
Peter: Also, the developments in policy analysis frameworks and the expanded taxonomy of policy instruments brings a richness to inform practice.
Sarah: So, where to from here?
Glyn: Peter and I hope some combination of Catherine, David and you will continue to update the book, steering it in the direction they find most compelling.
Catherine: I hope we will be able to expand on Indigenous and feminist perspectives and hopefully introduce new approaches to the institutions and systems of governance and policymaking that inform Australia’s progress. Most importantly, I would be keen for Indigenous co-authors given the foundational importance and centrality of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander nations, their worldviews and practices and the need to centre and celebrate these as holding great opportunity and promise for Australia moving forward.
Althaus, C., Ball, S., Bridgman, P., Davis, G., Threlfall, D. (2023). The Australian Policy Handbook: A Practical Guide to the Policymaking Process (7th Ed), Oxon: Routledge.
This blog is kindly reproduced with permission of Routledge. The original article can be found here.