Public servants have agency too

Sometimes the common perception of a public servant’s role, in the tradition of most Western democracies, can be confused as lacking power to exercise agency. It is a view a group of academics are on a mission to change, with the launch of The Palgrave Handbook of the Public Servant.

The ordinary Australian public could be forgiven for assuming that (at home at least) politicians decide what we do and the bureaucrats make it happen. So what in that dynamic suggests the APS has any agency at all?

Speaking to The Mandarin about a new handbook of public servants, co-editor and UNSW Canberra’s Professor Helen Dickinson says that during her research career she has encountered views from people within the APS sensing that they also lack real agency.

“You do have agency and you do have the ability to do particular things, and you’re not just at the whim of politicians and political advisors,” she says.

Dickinson says it is because of this misconception...