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The Australian National Council on Drugs (ANCD) and governance in the Australian drug policy arena.

Article Excerpt
For a range of historical, political and constitutional reasons, drug policy in Australia has been strategically organized at a national level only since 1986. The National Campaign Against Drug Abuse (NCADA), launched in 1986 by the Hawke Labour government, institutionalized a framework and language for a national approach to drug policy making. This approach allowed the states and territories to deliver locally relevant alcohol and drug services and to come together annually to ensure a uniform national approach to drug strategy. Since the first NCADA, drug policy making has involved a complex set of institutional, funding, advisory and political structures. Currently the national drug strategy (NDS) involves nine governments in the Council of Australian Governments (COAG), 18 Australian and two New Zealand ministers in the Ministerial Council on Drug Strategy (MCDS), 24 government officers in the Intergovernmental Committee on Drugs (IGCD) and approximately 140 individuals in numerous advisory committees (Successworks, 2003: p 53). Most importantly, the NDS is modeled on consensus decision making using a policy community approach (Fitzgerald & Sewards, 2002).

In 2003, however, two reviews of Australian drug policy documented the tensions in the current NDS. A commissioned review of the NDS noted governance difficulties and a perceived instability in the meaning of the framework term "harm minimisation" (Successworks, 2003). A federal parliamentary inquiry also recommended substantial changes to the NDS (Parliamentary Standing Committee on Family and Community Affairs, 2003).

The NDS evaluation specifically reported on the impact of the prime minister's chief advisory body, the Australian National Council on Drugs (ANCD), on the Australian drug policy environment (Successworks, 2003). The review of the NDS specifically noted that the relationship between the ANCD and the peak national governmental committee, the IGCD, was strained:

The effectiveness of the IGCD and its ability to make decisions was perceived as questionable because of the bureaucratic nature of the structures and processes.... Respondents felt that the reported lack of action and responsiveness has resulted in missed opportunities, lack of ability to influence public debates and increased influence of a small but vocal lobby. In addition, the potential of the partnership has not been maximised and the collective skills and expertise of the field has been underutilised. The relationships between the MCDS, IGCD and the ANCD are considered difficult and counterproductive, as there is perceived and apparent duplication and confusion about roles and areas of interest. (Successworks, 2003, pp 54-55)

A survey of respondents in the above evaluation revealed that the most prevalent negative perception (16%) of the governance arrangements in the NDS was "There is tension between ANCD and IGCD." Coming from a government-commissioned evaluation, this was an extraordinary finding. Even more remarkable is that the strain in this relationship is still occurring six years after the introduction of the ANCD to the policy-making arena. What is unclear is why this is the case, and why the introduction of the ANCD continues to upset the apparent harmony of the national drug-policymaking arena.

The difficulties noted in the most recent reviews have not been with outcomes from policy. Rather, the difficulties noted have been with strategic direction and governance of drug strategy. To explore these issues, I will recount a story about the Australian drug policy arena and the impact of the ANCD during this period. Berridge has previously utilized policy analysis techniques that examine the structures of policy making in the United Kingdom (Berridge & Thom, 1996; Berridge 1999, 2000). One of the most unexplored dimensions of drug policy is the role of drug policy practitioners (Berridge, 1999). Policy research drawing on specific analytical tools for understanding policy-making processes is rare in the Australian drug policy literature. Most usually, Australian policy analysis focuses on outcome measures through summative analysis or formative evaluation for the purposes of strategic planning (Crosbie, 2000).

There is a plethora of policy research examining blockages to policy and structural change in policy arenas, variously called institutional inheritance, immortality, stickiness, lock-in, deadlocks, path dependency, or appropriateness (Hurley et al., 2001; Goldfinch & t'Hart, 2003). Given the identified tensions between the ANCD and other parts of the NDS, the introduction of the ANCD can be understood by examining the perception of those involved in the governance of Australian drug policy making.

This paper examines the impacts of the ANCD on the drug policy arena with two specific objectives--to document how the ANCD was received in the drug policy arena and to examine how Australian drug policy makers responded to the introduction of the ANCD.

Data collection and analysis

Policy analysis is an eclectic field that can draw on a range of data sources such as interview data, historical materials, and institutional reporting (for examples of multiple data collection strategies in an Australian context, see Lewis and Considine, 1999; O'Sullivan & Down, 2001). The data for this paper come from historical records of policy making, focus group discussions, and interviews conducted with policy makers as part of a study of the Australian approach to drug policy making (Fitzgerald & Sewards, 2002). Overall, 142 persons were consulted as part of the national study (38 policy bureaucrats, 14 researchers, 74 non-government drug-treatment service providers, and 16 police).

The study was funded by the Australian National Council on Drugs and was approved by the University of Melbourne Human Research Ethics Committee. Data were collected during 1999-2000 and reflect the experience of policy makers at the time. There have been subsequent changes nationally and in the states and territories. A brief account of the findings of this study has been published (Fitzgerald & Sewards, 2002). This paper reports on a detailed analysis of the impact of the introduction of the ANCD on the policy arena.

Health, education and justice ministers were invited to nominate potential interviewees within relevant government departments and advisory structures. Those nominated could choose not to participate. Additionally, participants could choose to participate either anonymously or fully identified. Interviewees also indicated whether material they provided was to be fully disclosed or treated confidentially. In this way senior policy makers could participate in the study in a manner of their choosing to enable full and frank discussion of the policy environment. Although only one senior government policy maker chose to remain anonymous, all interviewee-identifying details have been removed in this paper.

Thematic data analysis was conducted on interview data using a modified grounded theory approach (Strauss & Corbin, 1998, p 47). This involves an inductive-interpretative approach to identifying themes from audiotaped interviews and group discussions. This type of approach does not attempt to establish thematic saturation, nor do the interview materials cited in this article represent the themes from all people interviewed. The inductive approach identifies themes and exposes new questions (Patton, 2002). The interpretive emphasis foregrounds the subjective role of the analyst in highlighting specific themes over others in light of the theory being used in an iterative process (Contandriopoulos, 2004). In this respect, validity is quite different from positivist investigation, as it emerges not from objective observations but from the proximity of the investigator to the phenomenon and the coherence between the analytical strategy and the theoretical issues being explored (Denzin & Lincoln, 2000).

Theoretical resources

While this paper essentially tells a historical story, it nonetheless draws on specific theoretical devices to describe the sequence of events and to disarticulate the complex power and policy relations in this particular period in the Australian drug policy arena. Three key terms are used: policy community, decision-making processes, and accountability. Each of these terms emerges from different arenas in policy research and is defined. Importantly, while I draw on these theoretical tools, they are not applied in a structured manner. Rather, they should inform the story being told. I have taken this approach so as to ensure that the policy story is not subsumed to the analytical work.

Public policy making that occurs at the intersection between government and special-interest groups is of great interest for policy researchers (Jordan & Mahoney, 1997). Virginia Berridge, in her analysis of drug policy making in the United Kingdom, describes the participants involved in drug policy making as belonging to a policy community (Jordan & Richardson, 1983). The policy community is an analytical construct that describes the collective interaction between government and special-interest groups. "Policy community" is not a generic term to describe those involved in policy making; it is the specific organization of people, ideas, and processes of relevance to public policy making only when a mutuality exists between government and non-government interest groups in policy making. Better analytic constructs can be used when government directs and controls policy making through centralized decision making, as it does, for example, in border control and immigration policy.

It is only when government enters into specific types of relationships with interest groups that the policy community construct can be useful (Jordan & Mahoney, 1997). Several key features of the policy community and the style of governance emerge from its activities.

A key feature of the policy community is the use of consensus decision making behind closed doors. Government avoids electoral politics and public conflict by attempting to maintain consensus and accommodation through an extensive network of consultative machinery....