The small ministry with the large reach: Using relationships to extend organisational capacity

Abstract

The Ministry of Pacific Island Affairs is charged with identifying the aspirations and needs of Pacific people residing in Aotearoa/New Zealand, providing high quality policy advice to governments and their ministries, and with advising ministries on how these might be achieved. With a large, dispersed client population, a small staff and limited resources, this represents a major task for the Ministry. However, the Ministry has been able to deliver these by forming a network of cooperative relationships with both its communities and the other ministries and agencies charged with formulating policy and delivering services to the communities. But limited resources prevent the Ministry mediating each of these relationships on a continuing basis. This paper focuses on the ways in which the Ministry of Pacific Island Affairs went about forming and using a web of "partnerships" with Pacific communities, social policy agencies, and service providers to overcome some of the challenges which a small ministry with limited resources faces. This paper attempts to show how a larger web of relationships became central to the Ministry's community development mission. The Ministry formed and nurtured a series of local partnerships between communi-ties' representatives and the ministries which deliver local programs. The arrangements free the Ministry to monitor the relationships and the performance of the ministries and agencies. Previously, we have described the organisational model as an apogāleveleve, or spider web, in which the web is a series of defined relationships created and maintained by the "centre" for a specific purpose: obtaining the best possible outcomes for constituent communities. Each operative relationship is connected via the centre, and mediated by the centre, which also monitors the performance of the system as a whole and moves to repair damage anywhere it occurs to ensure that the web as a whole continues to deliver outcomes. The network of cooperative relationships, or partnerships, has made it possible for the Ministry to achieve significant results relatively quickly with limited resources.