Researching public policy and public administration: are Australian academics on the right track?

- consider explicitly phenomenological approaches eg RFI Smith’s paper on public value, which takes the idea behind the theory, rather than the theory itself, in order to adapt it to Australian situation (Smith 2004).

In thinking more critically about the Australian research agenda, it will be necessary to consider carefully the pressure from the ARC and from individual universities, to publish in A* international journals (invariably from the US and the UK). Using Australian examples or cases, so necessary in understanding the reality of these practice-oriented disciplines, may be frowned upon by international journal editors.

In conclusion

The primary duty of scholars in practice-oriented subjects such as public policy and public administration, is to understand what is happening around us. I have argued that, insofar as our efforts have been theoretically orientated, they have fallen short, because we have been trying to apply models drawn inductively from other systems, to our own. Consequently, there is a big gap between the theoretical apparatus we try to apply, and what researchers in Australia (as well as others from countries outside the UK and the US) actually write about. We tend to look for problems in the wrong place, or write accounts of existing practice that are too descriptive to be of much use, either as explanation or prescription. The result is a frustrating irrelevance for those working from a base in political science, and a dominance, in the real world of practice, of the market-related preoccupations of economic analysis. These have their place, of course, but the study of public policy and public administration, by those who should be experts in the field, needs to be better-balanced.