Elizabeth Eppel

Victoria University of Wellington · School of Government

This handbook surveys knowledge from all six of the planet’s continuously inhabited continents to understand how governments and related institutions have attempted to advance human development and improve social outcomes over the past several decades. The current state of knowledge about the social welfare sphere is robust, but explorers of its tw...

Complexity theory is used to explore an exemplar of how digital government services evolved under conditions of uncertainty and rapid change created by COVID-19 in 2020. Based on a qualitative, constructivist research design, informed by interviews with key senior public servants and document analysis, the complexity lens helps us to understand how...

Seemingly intractable or ‘wicked’ problems are often characterised by the complexity and uncertainty involved. However, these characteristics are not always accounted for within research design. How health care systems may effectively respond to intimate partner violence presents a complex research problem. Researchers have been challenged to accou...

Introduction The impacts of violence have a significant effect on health and well-being, particularly for women and children. Violence within families is widely recognised as a complex problem constituted by constantly interacting and evolving social, economic, health and cultural elements. Calls for integrated services have arisen from growing und...

This Element is about the challenges of working collaboratively in and with governments in countries with a strong New Public Management (NPM) influence. As the evidence from New Zealand analyzed in this study demonstrates, collaboration – working across organization boundaries and with the public – was not inherently a part of the NPM and was ofte...

Complex problems generate uncertainty. The number and diversity of interactions between different health professionals, perspectives, and components of the problem makes predicting an outcome impossible. In effort to reduce the uncertainty of intimate partner violence interventions, health systems have developed standardized guidelines and protocol...

This article presents a systematic review of literature that explores the educational value of the Internet in the home for school aged children. Research published between 2008 and 2018 was examined and 67 items were analyzed. A range of positive, negative and neutral correlations or outcomes of home Internet use were identified across the three f...

The New Zealand Government's Performance Improvement Framework (PIF) is aimed at public sector organisational improvement. The PIF exemplifies how the characteristics of new public management (NPM) challenge the evolution of performance systems attempting to go beyond performance management. The paper provides an empirical example of the operation...

Objective To explore what affects sustainable responses to intimate partner violence within New Zealand primary care settings using complexity theory. Design Primary care professional interviews on intimate partner violence as a health issue are analysed using a complexity theory-led qualitative research methodology grounded in poststructuralism....

Although complexity theory is increasingly used to explain and understand complex health-system behavior, little is known about utilizing complexity theory to augment qualitative research methods. We advance this field by describing our use of complexity theory as a qualitative research methodology to explore sustainable health-care responses to in...

Background Integrating sustainable responses to intimate partner violence in health care is a persistent and complex problem internationally. New Zealand holds a leading role, having established national health system infrastructure for responding to intimate partner violence within hospital and selected community settings. However, resources for,...

This article reports findings from a study that examined how pre-adolescent children, age 9–11 years participate in the digital world. Children from 14 different communities across New Zealand were interviewed in focus groups to explore their experience of using digital devices and the Internet. The findings indicate that the differences in use and...

Introduction to the special issue ‘Teaching Complexity’

In 1989, New Zealand started to follow an international trend of reforming education policy according to the neoliberal principles of competition, choice and self-managing schools. Since then, the increasing availability of digital data in schools has corresponded with the development of student achievement measurement tools and benchmarking of sta...

Implementing effective and sustainable health care responses to intimate partner violence (IPV) is a complex public health problem internationally. Increasingly scholars are recognizing that research methods which explore health-system responses to IPV obscure the complexity of the problem. This paper discusses the use of complexity theory for rese...

With a particular focus on education and learning activities, the researchers wanted to understand the factors and conditions that influence children’s use and experience of digital technologies in education and learning in the New Zealand context. The research also sought to understand what support might be needed for different groups of young New...

Victoria University of Wellington has academics with expertise across the disciplines who are interested in opportunities to apply their expertise to assist public entities in their use of digital data. This report is the result of a scoping activity undertaken through an exploration of literature and interviews with school leaders to explore the a...

A compressed overview of complexity theory in public administration creates a starting point for comparison with other theories-in-use. The underpinning methodological traditions of extant theories of public administration are compared for compatibilities with complexity theory. Concepts generally acknowledged as within the scope and interest of pu...

Although research evidence shows that people have strong concerns about their privacy online, this does not necessarily mean that they do not share their personal information in varying online relationships. This paper presents New Zealand-based empirical research findings into people’s actual online information-sharing behaviours rather than their...

This paper aims to understand what goes on in the black box of successful, joined-up ICT-enabled service transformation, where complex interactions and integration must occur among the horizontal processes internal to a joined-up service delivery network, the vertical top-down processes of the organizations involved, and the change processes caused...

Using the lenses of complexity theory and dimensions of the SERVICE framework, the paper provides an abductive analysis of a freshwater governance case study. It aims to further develop our theoretical understanding of the complex interactions which contribute to the operation of sustainable public service organizations and systems. The analysis ex...

A refrain heard often in respect of Canterbury’s current approach to water governance is ‘there had to be a better way’. Canterbury has 12.7% of the national population, contributes 13% to GDP, and yet encompasses 17% of New Zealand’s land area, much of which, because of soil type and slope, is considered irrigable. What happens in Canterbury has m...

Our lives and our livelihoods depend on fresh water. Our cities and the appeal of our countryside to New Zealanders and tourists alike are based on plentiful supplies of fresh water. The overwhelming majority of New Zealand’s exports – not least agricultural and horticultural – require water, and in large quantities. Indeed, in many respects water...

It is not unusual for public management systems to be ‘caught by surprise’ when events unfold which had not been anticipated in policy processes. An empirical example from New Zealand is used to show the contribution complexity theory has to make to helping public management scholars and practitioners understand the origin of surprises and anticipa...

In March 2012 the Prime Minister announced a set of ten goals or result challenges, and named the ministers who are to be held politically responsible for achievement of each of the results and the specific public sector chief executives with management accountability. This ‘to-do list’ (Key, 2012) was accompanied by the release of the report from...

Improving cross-agency information sharing is at the heart of service transformation efforts to provide more effective services to individuals with complex social needs. So far, however, there is not much empirical research available on cross-agency information sharing. This article explores New Zealand-based cross-agency information sharing practi...

Interest in the development of complexity theory and its application to policy and social sciences has been accelerating over the last decade. Drawing on three pieces of recent New Zealand research, this article aims to provide an introduction to complexity theory for policy practitioners and researchers, highlighting principles of complexity theor...

The thesis examines how policy processes occur in practice over time, and advances a theory for understanding and explaining them using a complexity analytical lens. This lens provides a different way of 'seeing' policy processes holistically, in comparison with dominant alternative actor-focused, institutions-focused or idea-focused perspectives....

In pockets throughout the New Zealand public sector, ordinary officials are doing extraordinary things as they learn to do something very difficult: how to collaborate with people from other agencies. This occurs as they learn what needs to be done in managing for shared outcomes in complex policy cases. They appear to be doing excellent work in ac...

Moving from planning for outcomes through formal accountability documents such as Statements of Intent to actually managing for outcomes is a difficult challenge – the ‘reach for the impossible’, in Weber’s words. But it is an important challenge if we are to achieve the goal of ‘a world class system of professional State Services serving the gover...

The desire of government and its agencies to develop new online forms of integrated service provision to citizens requires an increased sharing of personal information between individuals and government agencies and across government and, with that, touches upon the citizen’s right to privacy. In this study, we used a qualitative research approach...