Building public policy on shifting sands: the case of the National Asset Management Agency

Over the last thirty years, there has been an increased demand for better management of public sector organisations (PSOs). This requires that they are answerable for the inputs that they are given but also for what they achieve with these inputs (Hood 1991; Hood 1995). It is suggested that this will improve the management of the organisation through better planning and control, and the achievement of greater accountability (Smith 1995). However, such a rational approach with clear goals and the means to measure achievement can cause difficulties for many PSOs. These difficulties include the distinctive nature of the public sector due to the political environment within which the public sector manager operates (Stewart and Walsh 1992) and the fact that PSOs will have many stakeholders, each of whom will have their own specific objectives based on their own perspective (Boyle 1995). This can
result in goal ambiguity which means that there is leeway in interpreting the results of the PSO. The National Asset Management Agency (NAMA) was set up to bring stability to the financial system by buying loans from the banks (which were in most cases, non-performing loans). The intention was to cleanse the banks of these loans so that they could return to their normal business of taking deposits and making loans. However, the legislation, also gave NAMA a wide range of other responsibilities including responsibility for facilitating credit in the economy and protecting the interests of taxpayers. In more recent times, NAMA has been given responsibility for building social housing. This wide-range of activities is a clear example of a PSO being given multiple goals which may conflict and is therefore likely to lead to goal ambiguity. This makes it very difficult to evaluate NAMA’s performance as they are attempting to meet numerous goals at the same time and also highlights the complexity of policy making in the public sector. The purpose of this paper is to examine how NAMA dealt with goal ambiguity. This will be done through a thematic analysis of its annual reports over the last five years. The paper’s will contribute to the ongoing debate about the evaluation of PSOs and the complex environment within which they operate which makes evaluation difficult as they are
answerable to multiple stakeholders who have different objectives and different criteria for measuring success.

Resolving conflict in bipolar societies: The fate of political settlements in Fiji and Northern Ireland

Ethnically divided societies that might be described as ‘balanced bicommunal’ (where there are two communities, each of which comes close to representing half of the population) pose a particular challenge to conventional principles of collective decision-making, and commonly threaten political stability. This article analyses the experience of two such societies – Northern Ireland and Fiji – with a view to exploring whether there are common processes in the route by which political stability has been pursued. We assess the manner in which a distinctive relationship with Great Britain and its political culture has interacted with local conditions to produce a highly competitive, bipolar party system. This leads to consideration of the devices that have been adopted in an effort to bridge the gap between the communities: the Fiji constitution as amended in 1997, and Northern Ireland’s Good Friday Agreement of 1998. We focus, in particular, on the use of unusual (preferential voting) formulas for the election of parliamentarians and of an inclusive principle in the selection of ministers, and consider the contribution of these institutional devices to the attainment of political stability. We find that, in both cases, the intervention of forces from outside the political system had a decisive impact, though in very different ways. In addition to being underpinned by solid institutional design, for political settlements to work effectively, some minimal level of trust between rival elites is required.