REGULATORY STEWARDSHIP

AND POLICY STEWARDSHIP ADD … PRODUCTIVE

FOR ACTION’ THAT WERE NOT ADDRESSED BY THE REFORMS OF THE 1980s AND 1990s.

The Treasury’s website is focused on regulatory stewardship. The term ‘ownership interest’ yielded 248 hits, but most of these were from previous decades before 2017. ‘Stewardship’ gets a similar number of hits (288), but all are much more recent. ‘Regulatory stewardship’, i.e. the proactive and collaborative governance, monitoring and care of New Zealand’s regulatory systems, gets fewer hits (162), but that identified a large body of well-developed supporting material, including government expectations, a resource document, guidance on Regulatory reporting, and the Secretary to the Treasury role as the functional lead. Regulatory stewards promote “better regulation”, an agenda long promoted by the OECD, in a new way, starting with the idea that regulatory systems should be seen as assets needing to be actively stewarded rather than predominantly liabilities or obstacles to business. Clearly, regulatory stewardship has provided ‘recipes for action’ and added a new dimension to the ownership interest not covered by the reforms of the 1980s.

That is not to suggest that the challenges faced in regulatory stewardship have been overcome. There was little practical guidance material on the Treasury website on how to actually undertake the stewardship responsibilities. But while regulatory stewardship is still a work in progress, it is a progressive research agenda. The regulation stock management tools tried in other jurisdictions (regulatory budgets, in/out rules etc.) have not proved effective. Regulatory stewardship looks to be a more productive line of inquiry for tackling the set-and-forget problem in regulation.

The Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet’s website is focused on policy stewardship. The term ‘ownership interest’ yielded just 4 hits and 3 related to commercial Crown companies. By contrast, stewardship yielded 248

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100% NZ Owned and Operated hits, mainly focused on policy stewardship. This reflects their role as functional leaders of policy and leaders of the policy profession. The Public Service Act introduced a new requirement for departmental chief executives to publish a long-term insights briefing at least once every three years, and the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (DPMC) coordinated the development of these. There was a wealth of guidance material on the DPMC website to support the development of these briefings. So, like the Treasury on regulatory stewardship, for DPMC, the concept of policy stewardship has provided ‘recipes for action’.

The Public Services Commission’s website coverage focused on policy and system stewardship.

The term ‘ownership interest’ yielded 9 passing references –the term didn’t even warrant a definition in the glossary of key terms. This low count may reflect that a range of material from the former SSC website, including the Occasional Paper series, has not been carried over to the new PSC website.

By contrast, ‘stewardship’ yielded 43 hits. While a number of the links focused on policy stewardship, there was also an inaugural State of the Public Service Report, the PSC’s first Long-Term Insights Briefing on consultation as well as a detailed research paper exploring the concept of stewardship. Stewardship was also listed as one of five core principles in the Leadership Success Profile. In the past, the precursor to the PSC undertook Performance Improvement Framework reviews, assessing the organisation’s capability to address emerging challenges. I looked in vain on the website for insights about how the PSC was going to define, measure, and assess how chief executives “are promoting stewardship of the public service, in particular, its long-term capability” as required by Schedule 3 S 16 4) (iii) of the Public Service Act. This may reflect that material is still under development, such as a revision to the Code of Conduct to incorporate the new principles or be in use but not included on the website.

Outside of the Insights Briefings and State of the Public Service Report, it wasn’t clear how much stewardship has acted as a recipe for action in the PSC. The State of the Public Service Report risks falling into the classic trap of performance reporting, which is the tendency to want to tell a positive performance story. The first report had high production values, few critical comments, and lots of good news stories.

Final thoughts

This article has focused on stewardship in the public management domain. We have not examined how stewardship has been applied in other domains, such as the digital space where the Government Statistician is the Chief Data Steward with powers under the Data and Statistics Act 2022. Much of the Public Service Act’s description of the resources that need stewardship is simply ‘old wine in new bottles’, repackaging and reframing what used to be termed the capability dimension of the ownership interest. It is unclear how any systematic assessment of long-term capability will be undertaken. However, the notions of regulatory stewardship and policy stewardship are productive lines of inquiry that have added a new dimension to the thinking on issues not adequately covered by the reforms of the 1980s and 1990s. Moreover, it addresses a gap by clarifying that chief executives’ roles go beyond supporting their ministers to include acting independently as stewards.

Derek Gill is an IPANZ Board member, and a research fellow at the VUW’s Institute of Governance and Policy Studies. Derek is a pracademic who combines wide-ranging experience as a public service leader in the Public Service Commission, the Treasury, and MSD / Child Youth and Family with teaching and researching public management in New Zealand. Derek’s involvement in the implementation of the Better Public Services reform directly contributed to the inclusion of stewardship in the 2013 amendments to the State Sector Act. The views expressed are the author’s personal take and not the views of any particular organisation.

Further Reading

Ayto, Jonathan. (2014) “Why Departments Need to Be Regulatory Stewards.” Policy Quarterly 10, no. 4 : 23–27. https://doi.org/10.26686/pq.v10i4.4506

Scott, Rodney and Eleanor Merton. (2021) “Stewardship streams in New Zealand public administration” https://www. publicservice.govt.nz/assets/Stewardship-streams-in-NewZealand-public-administration.pdf

K., Marsh, D., Dickinson, H., & Carey, G. (2017). Is all stewardship equal? Developing a typology of stewardship approaches. Canberra: University of New South Wales Canberra Public Service Research Group. Retrieved from https://apo.org.au/node/303220 van der Heijden, J. (2021). Regulatory stewardship: the challenge of joining a virtue and a mechanism. Policy Quarterly (17), 57-63. doi: 10.26686/pq.v17i1.6731