Abstract This chapter tells a story about the ‘ghost’ of an aid agency that was terminated some years ago in Australia. The memory of the agency once known as AusAid lives on through a changing oral history that is captured in everyday language. The chapter shows how this oral history keeps alive memory of the agency’s policy ideas and political value to security and climate change agendas. This leads to an argument that memorializing stories, created through the politics of memory and characterized by nostalgia, remember aspects of policy but forget others. The survival of these stories in this case suggests that intentionally erasing the past is virtually impossible and that strategic efforts to forget termination politics can lead to the retaining of memory.

Abstract This chapter returns the reader to theory and research design through a discussion of the socio-cultural aspects of memory within bureaucracies. The theorizing synthesizes early sociological thinking about social memory, organizational studies that focus on remembering, and public policy research that relies on traditions and storytelling to explore how cultural representations create memory. It then focuses on storytelling through an argument, based on the work of Linde (2009), that stories are appropriated across tellers and this leads to aspects of cultural memory being both remembered and forgotten. The chapter therefore posits that cultural amnesia is registered through an absence of stories or changes to stories which leads to a lack of social remembering. The chapter concludes with a methodological discussion about how storytelling memory should be studied, which then structures the cases that follows in later chapters.

Abstract This chapter defines institutional amnesia as the inability of policy actors and organizations to remember and recall policy-relevant knowledge from the past. The rationale for the book is then explained through a claim that despite its importance, we lack data about memory loss in government. A two-part structure is outlined alongside an argument that the study of amnesia needs to span across formal-institutional and socio-cultural dimensions. The research design and methodology are summarized, and the key findings of the research are outlined. Central to these is the view that in these Westminster systems, data is not only lost because of amnesia: it also renders existing data meaningless.

Abstract This chapter communicates findings about the effects of institutional amnesia, which have been generated through survey and interview data that captured the perceptions of public servants in Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. The findings show three effects. First, that amnesia causes the repetition of history in administrative terms which produces both positive and negative outcomes. Second, that amnesia causes the loss of the ‘why rationale’ within public service organizations, which means that public servants cannot explain why their world looks the way that it does. Third, that amnesia creates large-scale inefficiencies in public agencies, which are not only registered in terms of resources but also the frustration and demotivation of public servants.

Abstract Government bureaucracies are meant to hold knowledge of the past so that they can speak truth to power and prevent history from repeating in problematic ways. This book, however, shows that bureaucracies in Westminster systems suffer from institutional amnesia, which means that they cannot always recall or use knowledge of the past. Through an international comparison of the public services of Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom the book sheds light on what causes this amnesia, the variety of effects that it produces, and the treatments that might help address the problems that it creates. The analysis shows that we need to reconceptualize institutional amnesia to better understand how governments lose memory through the socio-cultural, relational, and meaning-making dimensions of public administration.

Abstract This chapter theorizes the formal-institutional aspects of amnesia in government. This theorizing synthesizes organizational theory and public administration literature, leading to an analytical focus on formal ‘storage bins’ as sources of memory and institutional ‘churn’ as a cause of amnesia. It is hypothesized that institutional churn, comprised of staff turnover, machinery of government reform, and knowledge management change, will be a significant cause of amnesia. This theoretical work sets the scene for the presentation of a conceptual model that drives our quantitative and qualitative analysis in part one of the book. A discussion of research design follows in which a most-similar comparison, a sequential explanatory mixed method design, and a variety of methods are justified in relation to the study of memory in government.

Abstract Existing research suggests that a lack of institutional memory causes history to repeat in problematic ways within public administration agencies. However, this claim has not been well supported by theory or data that illuminate the process and effects of history repeating. To remedy this, the nascent concept of institutional amnesia is presented here as a means of theorizing repetitions of public administrative history. A sequential explanatory mixed method research design uses quantitative survey data (n = 1608) and qualitative interview data (n = 75) generated in the public services of Australia, New Zealand, and the UK to show how institutional amnesia can lead to the recycling of ideas and practices, the inefficient relearning of information-seeking processes and the delivery of conducive decision-making environments that can help address historical problems. These findings draw attention to the fact that administrative history does indeed repeat in public agencies because of institutional amnesia, but that it does so in positive as well as negative ways.

Abstract This chapter reveals four stories that combine into the ‘Treasury orthodoxy’ in the United Kingdom. The orthodoxy is a set of values that give Treasury officials confidence in their self-identity and help them retain memory as other departments suffer from amnesia. The chapter describes how the self-identity stories that create the orthodoxy run in parallel, and change in their telling, but, ultimately, it shows that they entrench the identity of the Treasury as something permanent and capable of withstanding the forces of institutional amnesia. In the churn of public service, the Treasury ‘remembers’ at an institutional level through this orthodoxy.

Public administration scholars pay increasing attention to the role of context as a pathway to genuinely comparative analysis. Specifically, they focus on the economic, institutional and socio-cultural conditions in which administration takes place. Population size is an overlooked contextual factor despite the fact that existing studies often make implicit, positive assumptions about the effects of smallness on administrative performance. We investigate these assumptions by focusing on small, rather than large states across three dimensions: representativeness, transparency and service delivery. Drawing on unique qualitative data from three small states from different continents, Malta, Samoa and Suriname, we find that contra implicit assumptions, small population size does not have the overwhelmingly positive effects that much of the literature assumes. Rather, smallness tends to undermine legal-rational decision making and to facilitate patronage-based service delivery. These findings indicate that the contextual turn in public administration needs to pay more attention to the way population size shapes bureaucratic practice in all states, large and small.

Abstract This chapter examines shared stories that connect public servants across two systems (the UK and Australia). By focusing on a policy area that is global in nature—energy policy—and inviting stories about it from two different public service locations, the idea of transnational amnesia is presented. This emerges from changing stories about structural reforms that communicate organizational suffering and pain but also acceptance of the inevitability of change that public servants need to exist within. These therapeutic stories show that public servants do not always wish to talk about machinery of government reforms. Instead, they would rather accept their effects and get on with the job. This leads to an argument that cultural memory can also be held in silences and an absence of storytelling.

Abstract This chapter delivers findings about the causes of institutional amnesia, which have been generated through survey and interview data that captured the perceptions of public servants in Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. The findings show that institutional churn, and turnover in particular, is a powerful explanation for amnesia in these public services. It also shows that institutional amnesia is caused by dynamics that are not simply about the loss of data. Instead, it is shown that institutional amnesia emerges through the inability to retrieve and utilize existing data, the inability to understand the context in which history was made, and via the severance of relational forms of memory that connect public servants together.

Abstract This chapter focuses on treatments for amnesia. A series of prescriptions are outlined which could help capitalize on the benefits of amnesia and reduce the problems that it causes. The chapter structures the treatments around the four most important findings in the book. These relate to institutional churn as a cause of amnesia, the loss of meaning and why rationales, history repeating, and the inefficiencies associated with memory loss. In relation to each of these we offer a series of prescriptions, based on our data and stories, that have the potential to address the issues we have uncovered. Out of this discussion comes three categories of treatment which we describe in terms of the heart, mind, and body of a public service.

Abstract This chapter examines the stories of three groups of public servants in New Zealand in relation to the New Public Management reforms of the 1990s. One group—those who led those reforms—tell celebratory stories about their success and precautionary stories about dismantling them. A second group—those who were not there but work with the legacy of the reforms—discuss how they accept and appropriate those stories to do their jobs today. And a third group—those too young and too junior to remember the reforms at all—discuss how they ‘know nothing’ about them. Yet their views have glimpses of history weaved through them. Together, these narratives speak to the concept of appropriation and the memory that is passed across public servant generations.

Small island developing states (SIDS) are disproportionately affected by the climate crisis yet have been marginalized within the global climate regime. Often overlooked in this story are their purposeful efforts to reform global climate governance in ways that increase the self-determination of all states over their climate futures. Drawing on interviews with senior civil servants in Antigua and Barbuda, alongside recent scholarship in political science and international relations, this article reframes SIDS regional and transnational actions as contemporary worldmaking-an anticolonial resistance-driven process of reimagining and reshaping global systems to foster greater self-determination for all states. SIDS generatively translate experiences of postcolonial (non)sovereignty, vulnerability, and dissatisfaction into new modalities of pragmatic, collective action to disrupt global climate hierarchies, advancing debates on reparative politics, repair, and climate justice. By centering SIDS' political agency to act as worldmakers in the international climate order, the article also expands debates on subaltern geopolitics. Finally, the article also shows how imaginaries of global climate governance are not only technical and political but also informed by the emotional and historical terrains of countries. Ultimately, this article argues that SIDS are continuing the anticolonial worldmaking projects of the mid-twentieth century, revealing that ideas of self-determination and resistance endure, even under profoundly disadvantageous structural conditions, offering critical insights into the possibilities for a more just and inclusive global climate regime.

Single-case studies, though once the foundation of political science, have become a high-risk strategy in the discipline. The risk is especially acute for scholars who do rich qualitative work about New Zealand and Australia. There is a double bind. On the one hand, the community studying Antipodean politics is not large enough or sufficiently well-defined to ignore trends and mores overseas. On the other hand, Antipodean politics is not exotic or important enough to command the attention of the larger discipline. The danger lies in 'falling off the map'. We consider the problem this poses for academic careers. We then outline a menu of strategies for surviving this double bind using the practices of comparative interpretive research. We posit that a more clear-eyed acknowledgement of the problem can lead to the conscious embracing of these strategies and the potential they offer for immersive case research.

Since 2011, countries across the tropical Atlantic have experienced severe influxes of the seaweed species Sargassum natans and Sargassum fluitans (henceforth, “sargassum”), with nearshore and onshore ecological, economic and social impacts locally and regionally. Not all affected countries have had the same response to this emergent environmental challenge. Here, we explore the first ten years of policies produced in response to sargassum influx risk across islands in the Wider Caribbean Region, considering the variation in form, content and aim of sargassum adaptation policies. This assessment of the variation in Caribbean adaptation policies allows lessons to be identified for rapid adaptation to emergent environmental challenges. We find that several countries have no national policy for sargassum adaptation, and many subnational island jurisdictions have no island-specific policies. Whilst there is increasing anecdotal evidence of private and local adaptations taking place to address sargassum influx events, there remains significant scope for government leadership and resource support in adapting to this emergent threat. The lesson is that private adaptations to emergent threats may be quicker to develop and execute than policy adaptation, but longer-term, larger-scale adaptations depend on evidence-based, widely supported government policies with clear avenues of funding.

The viability of small island developing states (SIDS) is threatened by three distinct processes – a backlash against globalisation; rising geopolitical competition between powers; and accelerating climate change – which are pulling at the threads binding the liberal international order together. We suggest that this order has been kinder to SIDS than is often acknowledged because its underpinning norms – sovereign equality, non-interference, and right to development – are inherently permissive and thus provide SIDS with choices rather than imperatives. Their leaders should fight for the continuation and enhancement of that order rather than be seduced by alternatives. We provide a rationale for and examples of policies to achieve this, including reforms to the way ODA is measured, debt restructured, climate finance allocated, and global governance organised. These enhancements represent the most plausible pathway for SIDS in a period of significant global upheaval. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.