Whānau Ora and the Collaborative Turn

Abstract

In the context of the ongoing evolution of the field of public management, this article first explores the two interlinked concepts of collaboration and accountability. It suggests that these are understood and applied in a number of different ways. Using research and semistructured interviews with a number of government officials and nongovernment service providers, the article then explains how these approaches are reflected in a current New Zealand initiative of devolved governance—Whānau Ora. The different, and at times conflicting, perspectives of New Zealand’s formal model of public sector management and that of traditional Māori culture are explained.

Keywords:

• collaboration
• accountability
• Māori
• devolved governance

Notes

¹ Although this can also be seen to reflect Metcalfe’s (1993) earlier suggestion that “if management in general is about getting things done through other people, public management is getting things done through other organisations” (p. 296).

² A Māori concept of chiefly authority has been explained as “… not somebody who tells people what to do, but it’s somebody who weaves the opinions of people together” (Hawksley & Howson, 2011, p. 250).

³ In New Zealand a marae is piece of land and a group of buildings, associated with a Māori tribe or subtribe, that serves as a focus for social and cultural events and activities, where social and family events are celebrated and important issues are discussed and ceremonies are performed.

⁴ This may in part be explained by earlier use of “whānau ora” in other contexts. Thus in 2011 the government agency responsible for the purchase of social services, Family and Community Services (FACS), renamed its Family Violence Whānau Ora Fund to the Family-Centred Services Fund—a semantic exercise that would have been lost on the nongovernment agencies receiving the related funding.

⁵ A Māori tribe.