Cases for the Practical State

Building Authorising Environments for Ordinary Times

This week, I examine the COVID-19 exercise of power and the lessons it offers to build an effective authorising environment for the future. This weekly practical state series explores the space between policy and practice, between centrally devised strategy and street-level reality, where discretion is exercised, trust is earned, and legitimacy is built day by day. Over the past eight weeks, we have explored how this works in ordinary times through frontline relationships with iwi and hapū, collaborative governance, and community-facing work. We have also examined the consequences of delivery failure for those on the ground, as well as the importance of individual public servants and institutional craft such as alliance contracting.

COVID-19 showed us something different: what happens when the practical state's normal conditions are suspended, replaced by emergency governance that achieves rapid results through concentrated authority.

Officials did excellent work during the pandemic. But what they achieved, and how they were able to achieve it, reveals as much about what the practical state requires as what it can accomplish.

Matthew Palmer once observed that public power in Aotearoa swings between two poles: concentrated executive authority on one hand, and a cultural desire for egalitarianism through decentralised delegation on the other (Palmer, 2007). It is not doctrine, he argued, but pragmatism that holds this tension in balance: an unofficial glue that keeps the state working when constitutional principle alone is not enough.

The practical state, which is one of the findings in my PhD, operates within Palmer's constitutional framework but focuses on something more specific: how officials exercise discretion in their daily work, building trust through repeated interaction and earning legitimacy through responsive action in the real-world context where delivery actually takes place. The practical state requires time, relationships, and ongoing democratic accountability. In contrast, emergency governance concentrates authority, suspends normal deliberative processes, and licenses extraordinary action precisely by setting aside these usual constraints.

Michael Lipsky's foundational work on street-level bureaucracy reminds us that front-line officials typically operate under resource constraints, ambiguous mandates, and competing pressures, requiring them to develop routines and relationships that enable and preserve responsive service delivery (Lipsky, 2010). Emergency conditions temporarily remove many of these constraints, but they also eliminate the democratic deliberation that gives discretionary authority its legitimacy.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, we witnessed officials doing remarkable work under emergency conditions. Bonnie Honig reminds us that emergencies arcs the state into its most visible form (Honig, 2009). They compress decision-making, suspend ordinary democratic processes, and permit extraordinary action. In those moments, how officials act matters as much as what they do.

Care, proportionality, and legitimacy are not optional: they are the conditions that stop emergency powers from corroding the democracy they are meant to defend. While Knight (2022) argues that Aotearoa did not have an accountability deficit during the initial phases, there remains a question about whether this can be said for the latter phases — especially the vaccination rollout and the regional lockdowns. The work of the practical state is more than just accountability.

Yet Honig also warns that "emergency politics" can create its own momentum. Once the machinery has proven it can move quickly, the temptation is to keep bypassing democratic deliberation long after the crisis is over. What begins as an urgent necessity can harden into a habit, narrowing the space for public contest and collective consent.

At the Ministry of Social Development, officials responded to Alert Level 4 lockdown with impressive speed and care. Within three weeks, the entire service delivery model shifted online and over the phone, reaching more people than before. Staff called 150,000 older people to check on their well-being, scaled wrap-around services to reach 1.3 million people, and doubled emergency housing placements (Public Service Commission, 2020). This was responsive, discretionary action that served people's immediate needs - exactly the kind of work the practical state aspires to achieve.

Officials could act this way precisely because emergency conditions had suspended the practical state's normal operating requirements. They were freed from consultation processes, usual approval chains, and the slow work of building consensus across multiple stakeholders. Clear mandates replaced competing priorities. Concentrated resources replaced fragmented budgets. Crisis authority replaced democratic deliberation. In Bill Ryan and Derek Gill's terms, the normal "authorising environment", with its emphasis on control, risk aversion, and multiple accountabilities, was temporarily simplified (Ryan & Gill, 2011).

The same suspension of normal constraints enabled unprecedented cross-agency collaboration. In five days, MSD, Treasury, Inland Revenue, and MBIE designed the Wage Subsidy Scheme. Within forty-eight hours, it was operational, supporting over half a million businesses and keeping 1.8 million people in work. A small business loan scheme followed in 18 days, lending $1.5 billion to 92,000 owners. This collaboration, bypassing usual procurement processes, approval layers, and sequential mandates, showed what becomes possible when the ordinary machinery of democratic governance is set aside.

Officials exercised their discretion skilfully during this period, especially in the first lockdowns. They demonstrated exactly the kind of responsive, relational practice that defines good public service. But they did so under conditions that the practical state cannot and should not rely upon.

Emergency governance achieves clarity by suspending the democratic deliberation, ongoing accountability, and distributed authority that lend legitimacy to the practical state. It works by concentrating power, not by building trust through repeated interaction.

Thus, the danger lies not in what officials accomplished, but in mistaking emergency effectiveness with a sustainable model of public governance. The practical state requires ongoing democratic legitimacy, built through time and through relationships. It depends on front-line discretion operating within accountable structures, not crisis authority that bypasses normal constraints. Emergency conditions may produce rapid results, but they do so by temporarily replacing the practical state with something fundamentally different.

In normal times, our public management system struggles with exactly the opposite problem. Authorising environments have become incoherent and inconsistent, mandates conflict, and front-line discretion narrows under layers of proceduralism. The lesson from COVID-19 is not that we should govern by emergency decree, but that we need to understand the distinction between emergency governance and the practical state, and what the practical state actually requires to function well under democratic conditions.

The practical state cannot be rushed, concentrated, or imposed from above. It emerges from sustained relational work, operates through accountable discretion, and gains legitimacy through ongoing democratic engagement and participation.

Emergency governance may occasionally produce good outcomes, but it does so by suspending precisely the conditions that make the practical state both effective and legitimate.

Make no mistake, we should celebrate the skill officials demonstrated during the pandemic, especially in the early days, while recognising a fundamental truth: the practical state requires what emergency governance suspends.

The challenge for public service and politicians is not to replicate crisis conditions, but to create proper authorising environments in ordinary times, where discretion can be exercised responsibly without bypassing democracy, and where strategic clarity and coherence enable effective delivery.

That is the task: to build clarity without concentrating power, and to sustain legitimacy without sacrificing speed. If we choose not to do it, we are choosing drift, delay, and the erosion of public trust. If we decide to do it, we will equip ourselves with the means to deliver without waiting for disaster to force our hand.

Next week, I will introduce you to the frontline weavers on the COVID-19 frontlines who worked hard to keep the practical state in action, despite the speed at which He Pōneketanga was moving.

References

Honig, B. (2009). Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy. Princeton University Press.

Knight, D. R. (2022). Accountability through Dialogue: New Zealand's Experience during the First Year of the COVID-19 Pandemic. In Routledge Handbook of Law and the COVID-19 Pandemic (pp. 31-42). Routledge.

Lipsky, M. (2010). Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Service (30th Anniversary Expanded Edition). Russell Sage Foundation.

Palmer, M. (2007). New Zealand's Constitutional Culture. New Zealand Universities Law Review, 22, 565–597.

Public Service Commission. (2020). Spirit of Service Awards 2020: Award winners. https://www.publicservice.govt.nz/spirit-of-service-awards/2020-award-winners

Ryan, B. & Gill, D. (eds). (2011). Future State: Directions for Public Management in New Zealand. Victoria University Press.