Policy Making as Morris Dance: Bureaucratic Cultures
Patrick Sullivan, Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies
This paper is about the development of bureaucratic culture and its influence in Aboriginal affairs where it interacts with Aboriginal communities and organisations. While this is an intercultural interaction, it does not occur through the overlapping of separate domains, but rather through the sharing of an intercultural field wherein Aboriginal people are sucked into patterns of action determined by the bureaucratic imagination. Representations of Aboriginal activity become the raw material of bureaucratic industry for those who, in many cases, will never know anything but over-mediated representations of Aboriginal life. While policy making has effects, it is not effective, as it is frequently the result of phatic activity directed inwardly to inter-bureaucratic relations rather than directly bearing on the material world of Aboriginal experience. The paper suggests that bureaucratic culture is established and maintained by the operation of hierarchy and manipulation of the flow of information through the system, both of which are mediated by ideologies of accountability. While the public sector has consistent procedures for both internal and external performance assessment, there is considerable space for the reinterpretation of information in the system so that all requirements may appear to be met. In a new and complex policy environment the path to effective implementation is less clear than the path to the creation and elaboration of policy itself. The danger is bureaucratic involution, where policy making appears like a Morris dance, deeply satisfying to the participants, but ultimately with unintended and confusing effects.
