# The policy definition and operating model issue

Public good in a public policy sense must be tied to values, cultures, history and the context of the community you are serving.
It is dynamic, not static, because each policymaking exercise, country or historical period can yield different framings and calculations of what constitutes the public good for that particular time, place and community.
This takes time and optimally gets the relevant public involved in the process. As you read this playbook, we encourage you to adopt our use of the term. We encourage you to avoid making assumptions about the public good, but instead take time and include your public in determining what it considers to be its “good”.
Our pragmatic attitude to the idea of “public good” is perhaps not surprising given our practical focus for this playbook and our origins in Australia, where we feature a particularly pragmatic outlook to policymaking (see Foundations section). We acknowledge that this particular approach may not sit well with theorists or even with other practitioners. Nevertheless, we invite discussion and debate about it as we journey together through policymaking as a way to create and encourage a more perpetually dynamic, rather than set-and-forget, method to how we enact policy.
The policy definition and operating model issue
“Policy” is possibly one of the world’s most misunderstood, misrepresented and misguided terms. It’s simultaneously blamed for problems and revered as the solution, even though 10 people would have
10 different ideas of what policy actually is. Countless academics and experts have struggled to specify a meaningful universal definition, and in doing so, have created a range of generic definitions, spawning even more ambiguity and unpredictability in policy design and delivery.
For example, the Oxford Dictionary defines policy as “a course or principle of action adopted or proposed by an organisation or individual” (Oxford,
2024). Cambridge (2025) tells us policy is “a set of ideas or a plan of what
 to do in particular situations that has been agreed to officially by a group of people, a business organisation, a government, or a political party”.
Merriam-Webster (2025) suggests “a high-level overall plan embracing the general goals and acceptable procedures, especially of a governmental body”. All of these could cover a broad range of scenarios, from two people agreeing on a napkin scribble, to a political speech, a security protocol, or an operational guide on how to maintain your oven. For people who need to develop, implement or manage policies in any organisation, a little more clarity and pragmatism is required.
In the context of government and the public sector, policies are a daily part of every public servants’ job. But only a select cohort have the word in their job title, and the inherent ambiguity of the term can create avoidable challenges on authorities, accountabilities, mandates and constraints, creating further ambiguity in operations and delivery.
The Australian Policy Handbook (Althaus et al. 2013, p246) defines policy as “a statement of government intent, and its implementation through the use of policy instruments”, a narrow definition that only acknowledges political policy, creating in practice two problematic consequences: a working assumption that political policy is the highest authority; and a deferral of delegated authority to politics. When “policy” is used explicitly to refer to the intentions of the government of the day, it leads to some strange or confusing behaviours in the public sector.
Senior executives may assume all policies are the domain and authority of a minister’s office, losing sight of the higher order policies found in the constitutional and legal frameworks of the jurisdiction and the operational policies which are within their authority as departmental senior executives. An assumption that all policies come from the minister can undermine the agency of public servants to exercise their operational and delegated decision-making, which in turn can impact departmental productivity and innovation.
Policy has also increasingly been developed by process oriented generalist methods, where:
- evaluation of the past is valued over co-design, exploration or testing in the present
- generalist skills are prioritised over domain expertise, experience or engagement

- policies are designed without substantial input from the very people who need to understand or implement them, let alone those who would be affected.
This “generalist” approach to policymaking has led to policies becoming increasingly vague, principles based, impractical to implement and inconsistently applied. This creates uncertainty and impost on the broader economy, often while not delivering on the actual policy intent (known as “policy drift”).
The separation of policy design from policy implementation—introduced through reforms in the 1990s—exacerbated the issue by creating a model where no one owns the whole policy lifecycle. The policy intent and assumptions are frozen in time. Policies are then designed by one team and implemented by another, creating a barrier and friction to policy improvement, and a challenge to adjusting policy settings in response to the realities of policy delivery or a changing policy environment. In this fragmented, brittle and stagnant operating model, policy development is framed as a purely conceptual exercise, compromising the ability of implementation teams to both contribute to the original policy design, or to offer the insight and expertise needed to address issues as they inevitably arise.
Even the best designed policy settings will need to evolve as the conditions and environment changes over time, ideally drawing on input and ongoing feedback from those affected with real and ongoing measurement of the intended and unintended public and policy impacts.
It is important, arguably essential, for all public servants, regardless of their role or level, to understand the policy environment in which they work. This means understanding:
- policy intent and institutional purpose, which helps everyone to be more impactful by providing shared and commonly understood goals and outcome objectives
- the rules and constraints of their institution, to ensure they don’t overstep their delegated authority or accountabilities
- all the relevant policies to their work (and their relevant authorities), which also helps to ensure a responsible and balanced relationship with ministers and their offices

- their delegated authorities, to help public servants more confidently innovate and proactively deliver on their delegations without politicising the public sector
- different policy modalities, to enable public servants to engage, advise and work with the right authorities at the right time.
Let us begin by establishing a practical and useful definition of policy for the public sector.