Definition:

In the Public Service Act, responsiveness is described as what the public service does to understand and meet people’s needs and aspirations, including how it works with New Zealanders when designing policies and services.

We want to hear from you:

In the context of future Open Government Partnership commitments, we are interested in building on the work we have been doing on public participation in policy development and service design:

• What do you think this public participation should look like?
• Who should be involved?
• How would that make a difference to you and others?
• What have you heard friends and family members, or others, talking about when it comes to this topic?

Here’s some more ideas on this theme that came out of our 2020 workshops: OGP NAP4 Ideas Responsiveness

With the idea generation workshops continuing into July, we’ll also be keeping this challenges open until Wednesday 28 July. 

Make sure you sign up for updates when you register if you want to stay involved in the conversation.

Why?

The Public Service delivers government services across New Zealand. The way that policies are developed and how services are designed impacts on every New Zealander in some way.

Examples:

New Zealand has developed three previous OGP National Action Plans with commitments to support greater responsiveness. For example, in National Action Plan 3:

• Commitment 5: Public participation in policy development – aims to assist the New Zealand public sector to develop a deeper and more consistent understanding of what good engagement with the public means
• Commitment 6: Service design – aims to develop an assessment model to support implementation of the all-of-government Digital Service Design Standard by public sector agencies

What have people said?

In 2018 we received nearly 100 ideas that expressed in various ways that government and New Zealanders should engage the public more in shaping policy decisions and the design of public services. National Action Plan 3 explains what happened to those ideas. Many ideas:

• pointed out the importance of ensuring that policies and services reflected the needs, aspirations, and expectations of people of different cultures, ages, genders and localities
• suggested that the best way of doing this was to work with people at all stages of the policy and service design and improve communication of what government is doing

We’ve heard there were much closer and more productive working relationships between government agencies and civil society partners during the COVID-19 response that worked better for people[1].

Responsibility

This discussion belongs to Te Kawa Mataaho, which is responsible for moderating and publishing comments. However, individual comments remain the view of person posting them and cannot be taken to represent the views of Te Kawa Mataaho. We will use our best endeavours to ensure that posts that do not meet our requirements are not published.