Designing public policy for health, wellbeing, and equity with David Lilley

Dr David Lilley will present his recent PhD research which is part of a quest to understand why health, wellbeing, and equity are not being prioritised in public policy and administration, and to develop means of responding to this situation. It draws on the redevelopment of the Waterloo public housing estate as a case study.

David will discuss the Human Systems Coherence Framework, a tool for identifying and critically examining the boundaries of individual policies and projects, as well as their interrelationships. It was used as the basis for conducting interviews with project stakeholders, analysing project documents, and analysing proximal and distal public policies. The emphasis is on identifying the actual rather than stated purpose of the redevelopment project, assessing the coherence between purpose and other project boundaries (internal coherence), and assessing coherence with other policies and projects (external coherence).

Although unstated in official accounts of the redevelopment project, its actual purpose was assessed to be the generation of surplus funds to maintain the housing agency’s operations, and a reduction in the agency’s maintenance liability, in a climate of little to no Treasury funding. Low levels of internal and external coherence were observed regarding social and other explicitly-stated objectives, while high levels of coherence were observed with regard to the actual objectives. High levels of coherence with external policies and projects provides evidence that the project is part of a broader phenomenon, rather than being an isolated case.

These findings are interpreted using the concepts of technical rationality, reification, and administrative evil, or the forgetting of the humanity of policy subjects. The potential use of the HSCF by different stakeholders to rehumanise housing policy and administration is explored, as is the potential application of the HSCF in other areas of public policy.

About Dr David Lilley

David has spent over 20 years working on place-based initiatives intended to improve outcomes for disadvantaged individuals and communities, in roles spanning the public, private, for-purpose, and university sectors. This has included positions as Manager of Social Planning, Research, and Evaluation for the renewal of public housing estates in New South Wales; the founding Director of an early childhood collective impact project in Western Sydney; the Deputy Director of the Health Equity Research and Development Unit in Sydney Local Health District; and a variety of consulting roles. He is concerned about the decline of citizen-centric public policy and administration, accompanied by increases in instrumentalism, managerialism and market mechanisms.
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