Navigating the Maze––Why Modern Policy Making Struggles in an Age of Complexity

Acton Institute for Policy Research and Innovation, 13 May 2025

In an era where governments are equipped with an unprecedented array of analytical tools, expert advice, and institutional mechanisms, it is paradoxical that the capacity for decisive, coherent policy action appears to be eroding.

Public institutions are more elaborate, formalised, and data-rich than ever before. Yet outcomes often appear fragmented, delayed, or reactive. What explains this growing dissonance between formal capability and effective governance?

This Insight argues that complexity is no longer a marginal or manageable variable in the policy environment; it is a structural and enduring condition. It arises from institutional proliferation, fragmented jurisdictional authority, competing stakeholder expectations, and information overload. In this context, policymaking is less about finding optimal solutions and more about managing competing demands in a constantly shifting landscape. Acknowledging this condition is not a concession to inertia but a necessary step toward redesigning governance to be fit for complexity.

This complexity is not the result of a single failure, nor can it be solved by bold announcements or technological fixes. It is a product of structural, institutional, and political contradictions embedded in the fabric of democratic governance. Understanding and addressing these contradictions is central to the work of initiatives like the Strategic Examination of R&D (SERD), which must operate not in a vacuum but within a fragmented, contested, and often incoherent policy environment.

From Overload to Fragmentation

The idea of government overload is long established. But today, the challenge is not just the volume of tasks but the fragmentation of responsibility across a sprawling institutional landscape. In Australia, the federal public sector alone comprises over 1,300 bodies, complemented by dense layers of parallel structures at state and local levels. Legislative and regulatory instruments have multiplied, creating a convoluted framework of obligations with ambiguous accountability.

Policy now frequently moves faster than the institutions tasked with its coordination. Cross-cutting domains like health, climate, and digital infrastructure routinely span multiple departments and jurisdictions, with no clear locus of responsibility. Federal structures often exacerbate these tensions, with overlapping mandates almost encouraging duplication and buck-passing. The result is a government architecture increasingly reliant on ad hoc workarounds: memoranda of understanding, intergovernmental councils, and advisory boards meant to patch over systemic incoherence.

This fragmentation creates friction at all policy cycle stages—from design to implementation and evaluation. Delays, diluted reform ambitions, and conflicting goals become routine. Crucially, fragmentation is not a residual flaw to be corrected; it is often the direct consequence of past reforms that added complexity without removing legacy constraints.

The New Phenomenon: Answers Without Questions

Contemporary public policy reflects a phenomenon of "answers without questions". It emerges from the discomfort of complexity and the impatience it provokes.

When systems become difficult to read, navigate, or control, politicians, policymakers, advisers, and opinion leaders tend to fall back on amplifying simple solutions to demonstrate clarity, decisiveness, and action. This desire to "cut through" complexity with rapid, formulaic responses does not reduce complexity; it simply compounds it. Symbolic reforms, linear interventions, and recycled mechanisms layer new rules over old tensions, obscuring rather than resolving systemic dysfunctions.

Schön and Rein (1994) described this dynamic as frame conflict: the mismatch between visible policy problems and their deeper cognitive or institutional framing. When policy actors converge on answers that emerge from an unchallenged frame, reform becomes performative rather than transformative. Superficial alignment replaces strategic questioning.

Too often, policy processes are driven by pre-ordained framing. For example, the following statements are familiar in innovation policy: “We must commercialise more university research.” “We must create more start-ups." “We must have more incentives to make firms invest in innovation." These answers are born of a particular logic. They presuppose what should be solved and who the actors should be, leaving little space to consider alternative paradigms.

In research and development policy, particularly, the persistent framing of a solution to research commercialisation as addressing the “valley of death" (between research and industry) has led to repetitive interventions—centres of excellence, hubs, incubators, translational funds—all underwritten by the assumption that commercialisation is a linear process in need of coordination or incentive. All the evidence available in innovation studies confirms that it is not.

But what if the underlying issue is not commercialisation per se but institutional misfit—where universities and firms operate under fundamentally different missions, timeframes, operating logics, and stakeholder expectations? Or, deeper still, what if innovation failure stems principally from the absence of absorptive capacity? The specific nature of this absence is rarely explored beyond technology diffusion and research translation.

Weak absorptive capacity is commonly attributed to a firm’s or sector’s inability to recognise the value of external knowledge, assimilate it, and apply it effectively to commercial ends. But even if firms recognise (the often contingent) value of external knowledge, which many do, they must juggle many other pressing business issues such as cash flows, capex investment priorities, dividend and remuneration policies, expectations for share price stability, building in-house technical skills, and organisational flexibility.

When consensus settles around poorly constructed or narrowly defined answers, the scope for meaningful policy innovation is constrained. There is performative agreement, but little epistemic openness. Evaluation, when it occurs, measures compliance with pre-set goals rather than interrogating whether the goals are validly grounded. 

Moreover, “answers without questions” allows institutional and political actors to avoid confronting trade-offs. Consensus becomes a shield against hard choices—on funding priorities, governance reform, or the redistribution of authority. Vague agreement flourishes precisely because it avoids specificity. As a result, policies remain directionally vague, multiply interpreted, and unevenly implemented. They carry forward tensions rather than resolving them.

Crowded Voices, Conflicted Expectations, Institutional Inertia and Risk Aversion

Pluralism is central to democratic legitimacy, but it complicates decision-making. Today’s governments contend with a far more diverse and vocal range of stakeholders: business, civil society, universities, digital platforms, and an empowered, digital-savvy citizenry. Each demands engagement, influence, and responsiveness.

Consultation, though essential, often becomes ritualistic. Governments solicit input but then pursue pre-set priorities. Social media amplifies pressure and polarisation. Decision-making is caught between competing imperatives: speed and deliberation, fiscal restraint and service expansion, innovation and regulation.

Governments also tend to create new coordination mechanisms to manage these tensions: advisory boards, strategy units, and task forces. These devices layer atop existing structures, increasing complexity while offering limited resolution. Governance becomes an exercise in procedural accumulation, rather than strategic simplification.

Institutional systems are built to endure, not to pivot. Agencies, programs, and rules acquire constituencies, resources, and symbolic capital. Rationalising them is politically fraught. Each added layer of compliance is justified in the name of accountability or equity. Cumulatively, these safeguards generate rigidity.

Risk aversion reinforces inertia. Fear of scandal, failure, or judicial challenge leads to process over adaptation. Public servants prioritise defensibility over responsiveness. Accountability is narrowly defined in legal terms, sidelining broader concerns about societal value or effectiveness.

Moreover, the diffusion of responsibility across multiple actors encourages blame avoidance. No single entity is clearly accountable for outcomes. Performance is difficult to track. Reform tends to focus on symptoms—efficiency, transparency, consultation—while leaving systemic misalignment untouched.

Conclusion: From Mastery to Navigation

This critique is not a call for pessimism. On the contrary, it is a plea for epistemic openness and strategic honesty. Real progress in handling policy complexity requires us to pause and ask: Are we solving the right problem? If the answer is unclear, then we must resist the temptation to reach prematurely for solutions.

The policy process must open space for contesting framings, surfacing latent assumptions, and admitting when dominant policy narratives no longer reflect the system’s reality. Strategic clarity does not come from consensus about the answers but from a willingness to ask more foundational questions—about values, purposes, and institutional design.

This requires building coalitions, nurturing institutional memory, and investing in relational capacity. It means prioritising alignment over authority and coherence over control. Reform becomes a continuous process of adaptation, not a sequence of grand resets.

This Insight was written by Dr John Howard, Director of the Acton Institute for Policy Research and Innovation. Dr Howard has advised governments and institutions for over three decades on industrial strategy, research policy, and innovation ecosystems. His current work explores how narrative, institutional capability, and strategic foresight can enable long-horizon public policy in complex systems.

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