Localisation in contemporary public management

If contemporary Australian public management is to respond successfully to international trends in the localisation of policy and implementation it will need a new knowledge base and a new set of skills. This chapter outlines the background to the deficits in these areas currently facing our public administrators and suggests ways of addressing them. Other authors in this book have identified many of the factors that are propelling changes to public management. Some of the key features of this changing landscape include: the re-emergence of community and its potential policy agency; the focus on place management; the importance of networks to knowledge creation; the convergence of traditional planning with social capital; the perceived redistributive failures of economic rationalism and market instruments. While there are broader discussions about the future roles of markets, communities and governments in public policy, we have focused in this chapter on the specific issues of new forms of knowledge in the public sector and the challenges such knowledge throws up for current instruments and practices – in short, introducing the idea that knowledge has an important spatial as well as temporal element to it.