Methodology
The capacity of the older forms of neo-institutionalism to deal with the practice of intergovernmental management is limited, because they posit institutions as structures external to agents, focusing less on the individuals populating these organizations and more on the settings from which actors draw their preference or incentive sets (rational choice theory), path-dependent constraints (historical institutionalism) and culturally appropriate rules and norms (sociological institutionalism) (Jackson 2010; Schmidt 2010).
For discursive institutionalism, by contrast, institutions are internal to sentient agents, serving both as structures of thinking and acting that constrain action and as constructs created and changed by those actors (Schmidt 2010). Nor are the older institutionalisms helpful in understanding how the federal system gives rise to a culture of ‘principled agents’: officials who act on the basis of principles and morals of public service and ‘protect the public’s money as if it were their own’ (Dilulio 1994, p. 281).Over the past decade, a burgeoning body of work in discursive institutionalism has illuminated and explained major processes of policy change. Several of these studies have looked at policies in a federal setting, including multi-level governance studies of the Eurozone (Schmidt 2017) and EU trade policy (De Ville and Orbie 2014). However, there has been very little analysis of federalism itself through a discursive lens,[45] and I have not identified any discursive institutionalist studies thus far of intergovernmental management. Accordingly, while my primary aim is to contribute to a better understanding of the practice of intergovernmental management, this chapter aims to extend a discursive institutionalist approach to an area to which it has hitherto not been widely applied.
I undertook a series of semi-structured, elite interviews, with the aim of getting to the heart of the ‘rules in use’ in intergovernmental management, the ‘distinctive ensemble of dos and don’ts that one learns on the ground’ (Elinor Ostrom, quoted in Lowndes and Pratchett 2005).
Interviews were conducted with 42 senior public servants from the commonwealth, state and territory governments, ensuring comparisons could be made between those from larger and smaller subnational jurisdictions, and allowing me to test whether factors such as resourcing might differentiate the exercise of agency.[46] I also wanted to explore whether there were jurisdiction-specific cultures that informed individual strategic choices.A second criterion for selection related to whether the interviewee worked for a central or a line department. This distinction allowed me to explore issues such as whether officials in central agencies had greater scope for personal initiative because of the influence central agencies wield, and because they had access to jurisdiction-wide perspectives and strategies. I was also interested in testing the extent to which officials in central agencies across the commonwealth-state divide might make common cause against their respective colleagues in line departments (Botterill 2007; Harwood and Phillimore 2012; see Inwood et al. 2011 for the Canadian perspective on this issue).
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