Sustainability transitions require extensive coordination work. Surprisingly, we know little about the actions of those driving them. Our research objective was to identify sustainability change agents and study their implementation work in the Australian water sector. Using key informant interviews, we sought to understand the efforts of change agents driving two sustainability transitions. Our key findings are that change agents: (1) Interpret their contexts; (2) Focus their energies; (3) Build trust among stakeholders; and (4) Share their visions of the future. As well as offering practitioner insights, this research lays the foundation for systematic studies of change agents and sustainable development.

What this research is about: this research explores how changes to government administrative structures and processes affect housing policy in Australia. It outlines what can be done to reduce some of the negative impacts of these changes. Why this research is important: the allocation of responsibility for areas of public policy is often called 'machinery of government'. While some Australian portfolios have remained stable over long periods, housing policy has been governed by various organisational units across the federal and state governments. Policy makers need to understand the effects of machinery of government changes, particularly in housing where debates about housing policy goals are ongoing.

Robots are an increasing presence in public spaces. While this can bring positive change, it can also bring risks. Anticipatory policy design is needed to promote good outcomes and minimize negative ones. We analyse existing public policy and regulatory settings in six large Asian cities to assess how well they have prepared for a future exhibiting increasing human-robot interactions. The analysis highlights factors to consider when setting the terms on which robots operate in public. Our findings indicate that attention has, to date, focused primarily on safety and privacy issues. Limited attention is being paid to broader issues relating to social and economic wellbeing. We conclude that significant scope exists for co-design and anticipatory policymaking. At its best, such work could promote enhanced social and economic wellbeing in tandem with growing human-robot interactions.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, Indonesia went through a conflictual process of policy debate demonstrating that, even in a crisis, evidence-based policy advice can be insufficient to shift policy settings. Looking back, we can see that a classic instance of punctuated equilibrium occurred. The result saw the Indonesian government following evidence-based best practice advice from the World Health Organization. This raises a vital question for policy research: How did this shift occur? The episode suggests more attention should be paid to how narrative framing facilitates the adoption of evidence-based policy. We report on an integrated analysis of policy documents, media sources, and transcripts of 44 elite interviews. This generated original insights into Indonesia's response to Covid-19. More broadly, the findings suggest four strategies proponents of evidence-based policy can use to strengthen their influence: (1) Advancing counter-narratives through credible actors with institutional authority, (2) Framing evidence to align with existing legal and policy frameworks, (3) Shifting or creating venues that empower evidence-receptive actors, and (4) Leveraging crises when elites perceive urgency and the availability of viable solutions.

A growing bandwagon of commentators declare our collective existence is subject to volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. Welcome to the 'VUCA world'. Since populations typically turn to governments for support when crises strike, there is merit in policy scholars paying close attention to the 'VUCA world' narrative. This article assesses the implications of the VUCA narrative for policy professionals charged with conducting policy coordination and development. If volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity are becoming more commonplace, what aspects of coordination and development work should change? We indicate how policy professionals might harness new technologies and integrate them with long-term planning tools to help governments anticipate and reduce the consequences of crisis events. A lot of the technology now at our fingertips can be usefully deployed to assist with improved policy coordination and development to rapidly and effectively respond to VUCA-like challenges. Further, more 'stewardship' capability in and around government must be built to enable exploration of future scenarios so societies can stand ready to address anticipated eventualities. We conclude that the VUCA narrative can promote salutary improvements in the practice of policy coordination and development.

We consider how lived experience might actively inform policy design. Good policy design calls for analysis of problems, how they might be addressed, and likely outcomes. Policy scholars and practitioners have devised methods that bring rigor to policy design through problem framing, assessment of potential interventions, and prediction of outcomes of those interventions. This pursuit of analytical and predictive rigor has often given short shrift to the insights of people whose lives are affected by current challenges and who will be impacted by policy change. Our theory of change is that creative engagement with citizens can generate insights of high value to the process of policy design. We introduce the Tomorrow Party - a design method for generating novel stakeholder insights regarding desirable future states. We then discuss initial findings from a series of pilots. Those findings suggest the Tomorrow Party is a broadly applicable creative tool for advancing policy design.

In this article, we develop a framework for robotic autonomy as contingent. We do so with an account of a series of online research workshops that asked people to design and test robot behaviours for a public space scenario of their choice, as a means to surface and discuss their understandings of robots. We show how, as people manipulated robots in a simulator, they came to understand the capacities and limits of robots in distinctive ways. Thinking with these virtual encounters with robots, we argue that robotic contingency can be understood as dependent on spatial context; as unfolding in encounters between people, robots, and other things, creatures and substances; and as subject to forms of accountability and responsibility that are ongoingly made in an uncertain world. Our analysis reinforces work on automated infrastructures, which understands them as made sense of and operating relationally. This is important because those infrastructures are a part of how people understand robotic technologies in an uncertain and processual world, and they shape their expectations about and imagination of automated technologies, such as robots, into the future. We conclude by speculating on implications for an open-ended robotics design that works with contingency rather than seeking to control it, and ask how a more expansive understanding of accountability might be assembled as part of this more emergent approach.

Background A complex array of legislation, regulation, policies and aspirational statements by governments, statutory agencies and pharmacy organisations constitutes the policy environment that influences Australian community pharmacy, including pharmacists' performance. Objective The objective was to assess the relevance of the policy environment to Australian community pharmacists' performance by examining stakeholders' perspectives on their professionalism and standards. Methods Inductive thematic analysis was undertaken on 38 semi-structured interviews of purposively selected individuals including pharmacists and other key stakeholders, from 4 socio-ecological strata (societal, community, organisational, and individual) that have influence on the person to person interaction that a consumer may have with a pharmacist in a community pharmacy. Results As indicators of their performance, pharmacists' professionalism and compliance with standards can no longer be assumed; they must be demonstrated. However, the current dispensing funding model compromises their ability to demonstrate professionalism and policy is lacking in relation to monitoring and rewarding standards. These shortcomings are further compromised by a growth in commercialism in community pharmacy which impacts the delivery of professional services. Conclusion The findings of this study have implications for pharmacy as an autonomously regulated profession in Australia. Dispensing funding policy could better support and reward quality in pharmacists' performance, and there is strong support for compulsory monitoring of standards. Compliance with a nation-wide quality framework, and provision of a minimum set of professional services should be an obligatory requirement of all community pharmacies.

Over the past decade, a range of efforts have been made to incorporate practices drawn from industrial and participatory design into elements of the public policymaking process. Our interest lies in the field of co-design in policymaking. This emerging field has seen considerable emphasis placed on informing policy development with knowledge and insights from those living with specific problems and existing policy settings. Following the extant literature, we define co-design in policymaking as a participatory and design-oriented process which creatively and actively engages a diverse pool of participants to define and address a public problem. Evidence to date suggests co-design in policymaking can be especially useful in broadening participation in policy development, encouraging creative speculation about how policy choices might shape future outcomes, and prototyping policy approaches to assess their feasibility and desirability. But evidence continues to emerge regarding the barriers in many public sector settings that preclude co-design practice from greater engagement with – and influence upon – long-established, tightly-held processes of policy development. Through critical assessment of existing literature, we summarise the current state of co-design in policymaking. We then suggest promising ways policy practitioners and researchers could contribute to making co-design an embedded practice in policymaking, well-used and well-recognised for the unique contributions it can make to policy development.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, many governments implemented social distancing requirements, lockdowns and stay-at-home orders. These caused unprecedented disruptions, especially in industries that often rely heavily on the labour of temporary migrants. As a result, temporary migrants were particularly disadvantaged by measures to safeguard population health. We critically scrutinise government policies related to temporary migrants in Australia during the pandemic. The Australian Government provided financial safety nets to individuals and families who were citizens and permanent residents, while deliberately excluding temporary migrants from such support. In contrast, efforts were made at the state level to compensate for this hardship. We trace how the Victorian Government ultimately came to provide financial support for temporary migrants. The case highlights how the interests of precarious members of society can go from being ignored to receiving the attention necessary to produce a policy change to meet their needs. With its emphasis on the role policy narratives play in shaping outcomes for temporary migrants, the analytical approach utilised here could inform future studies of migrant treatment in other contexts as well as studies focusing on other vulnerable and politically marginalised members of society.

Robots are an increasing presence in our public spaces. Accordingly, in this paper, we make an argument for the importance of understanding how they produce spatiality by developing three robotic logics: predictability, partitioning, and connection. We show how the robotic bias towards orderly categories exists alongside processual accounts of spatiality, and how the forms of anticipatory knowability that robots require play out in the contingent flow of everyday human life, where knowledge emerges as we move in and become engaged with our environments. We analyse the tensions at play here, reviewing how robotic programming and behaviours treat the spaces in which robots operate, and then interrogating robotic ways of understanding, structuring, and acting in their surroundings. This paper argues that, through the emplaced bodies of robots, their computational logics participate in an emergent production of spatiality that always exceeds their preference for knowability. Given that robots are already beginning to reconfigure our cities, we argue that unreflective accommodations of these logics should be resisted, and that we instead need better understandings of how robots' logics shape their agential capacities in our shared worlds.

The Australian Federal Government’s Community Pharmacy Agreement (Agreement), initiated in 1990 and renegotiated every five years with a pharmacy owners’ organisation, is the dominant policy directing community pharmacy. We studied the experience with the Agreements of 38 purposively selected individual pharmacists and others of diverse backgrounds, using in-depth, semi-structured interviews. Although perceived to lack transparency in negotiation and operation, as well as paucity of outcome measures, the Agreements have generally supported the viability of community pharmacies and on balance, contributed positively to the public’s access to medicines. There were, however, contradictory opinions regarding the impact of the policy’s regulation of pharmacy locations, including the suggestion that they provide existing owners with an undue commercial advantage. A reported shortcoming of the Agreements was their impact on pharmacists’ abilities to expand their scopes of practice and assist patients to make better use of medicines, in part due to the funding being almost totally focused on supply-related functions. The support for programs such as medication management services was perceived to be limited, and opportunities for diversification in pharmacy practice appeared constrained. Future pharmacy policy developed by the government could be more inclusive of a diverse range of stakeholders, seek to better utilise pharmacists’ expertise, and have a greater focus on health outcomes.

Robots are an increasing presence in our public spaces. Accordingly, in this paper, we make an argument for the importance of understanding how they produce spatiality by developing three robotic logics: predictability, partitioning, and connection. We show how the robotic bias towards orderly categories exists alongside processual accounts of spatiality, and how the forms of anticipatory knowability that robots require play out in the contingent flow of everyday human life, where knowledge emerges as we move in and become engaged with our environments. We analyse the tensions at play here, reviewing how robotic programming and behaviours treat the spaces in which robots operate, and then interrogating robotic ways of understanding, structuring, and acting in their surroundings. This paper argues that, through the emplaced bodies of robots, their computational logics participate in an emergent production of spatiality that always exceeds their preference for knowability. Given that robots are already beginning to reconfigure our cities, we argue that unreflective accommodations of these logics should be resisted, and that we instead need better understandings of how robots' logics shape their agential capacities in our shared worlds.

Scholarship on evidence-based policy, a subset of the policy analysis literature, largely assumes information is produced and consumed by humans. However, due to the expansion of artificial intelligence in the public sector, debates no longer capture the full range concerns. Here, we derive a typology of arguments on evidence-based policy that performs two functions: taken separately, the categories serve as directions in which debates may proceed, in light of advances in technology; taken together, the categories act as a set of frames through which the use of evidence in policy making might be understood. Using a case of welfare fraud detection in the Netherlands, we show how the acknowledgement of divergent frames can enable a holistic analysis of evidence use in policy making that considers the ethical issues inherent in automated data processing. We argue that such an analysis will enhance the real-world relevance of the evidence-based policy paradigm.

The importance of governance for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is uncontested. However, the design of effective governance arrangements to initiate and deliver the necessary transformations is complex, multi-scale, and multi-actor and many knowledge gaps remain. For would-be reformers, a fundamental challenge arises because all transformative efforts must proceed, at least initially, within existing governance arrangements which can be highly resistant to change. While there is a rich literature on governance of transformations, knowledge remains fragmented. In this paper, we first review this literature and highlight important governance scales as spatial, jurisdictional, sectoral and temporal. We highlight common governance challenges that may arise from tensions within and between these scales, and how governance framings and design choices of actors may accentuate or ameliorate these challenges. To further illustrate, we review a selection of recent case studies on transformations to the SDGs and highlight common governance challenges and solutions. We conclude by suggesting five concrete steps that would-be reformers could usefully take to increase the likelihood that their transformation efforts will meet with success.