Discussion

Federal structures are more than just a set of constitutional, legal and politi­cal structures and processes that determine the interests and motives of the political and bureaucratic actors within them.

The federal system as a ‘discursive space' (Hardy and Maguire 2010, p. 1367) is characterized by active contestation between multiple narratives and dis­courses. These discursive spaces may be temporally limited, displayed in in short bursts of activity at formal dinners and gatherings of officials and politicians, or in the course of projects commissioned by ministerial councils; or they may become embodied in longer-lasting structures and processes such as networks, the support structures for formal intergovernmental agreements and, of course, the policies that are produced through the federal system.

Much of the practice of intergovernmental management is shaped by having to navigate between the strategies prescribed by competing roles, rather than simply adopting one or the other in an instrumental way. Intergovernmental actors understand their roles and are guided by norms and values in ways that are not uni-dimensional but require choices to be made among them (such choices themselves representing a form of agency).

The discursive styles described here illustrate how officials consciously draw on and choose from a range of discursive sources in the federal system to find the best solution to the particular problem at hand. These sources include the values, perspectives and narratives embedded in organizational and juris­dictional cultures; the formal and informal elements of the federal system that embody those narratives (such as formal agreements and communiques, long­standing processes for committee work or informal networks and the conven­tions that underpin such work); and specific policies and programs that are accompanied by their own narratives and historical settings.

This suggests that we need to adopt a more detailed and nuanced under­standing of how intergovernmental management contributes to change and stability in the Australian federal system. The process of reaching ‘up' for a guiding narrative and applying it to a policy canvas precludes a simple answer to the role officials play in providing both stability and opportunities for reform. The agency they employ clearly means different things according to the context and problem the individual official confronts, and the practices he or she adopts in response.

Some limitations on the current study suggest directions for further work. It would be interesting to know, for example, why and how certain policies have been shaped by their discursive context,^[52] or whether discursive agency works differently in different federal policy settings, or even in other federations. It may be the case, for example, that networkers tend to appear more frequently in a regulatory policy environment because of the regulatory agencies' greater independence from the centre and the need for policy harmonization to avoid ‘shopping around' by the regulated community.

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