Practices or Policies?

April 2024: Reflecting on an enabling Council

Which are more important, Practices or Policies?

We’re all familiar with policies that aren't or can’t be put into practice well.

Procurement is a recurring example of this in my life. Many agencies have a sound policy to value small local suppliers, encourage supplier diversity, support Māori-owned businesses or other enterprises with secondary benefits.

In practice, tenders often get posted to the government tendering site with a 12-day turnaround time and a 10% weighting to 'sustainability' wrapped into the methodology section that's meant to cover everything from choice and provenance of materials to environmental impact, social benefits and supplier diversity.

Only the big firms have capacity to turn these around in time; the whole process is antithetical to many of the aims outlined in the procurement policy.

The reverse can also happen. Policies can be bland or even restrictive but be buoyed by people and practices that are enabling. At their best, policies and practices are mutually reinforcing.

My happiest example of an easy and enabling local government process was in 2017, working on a public art project in the Yarra Ranges with artists Troy Innocent, Matthew Riley & Kate Baker.

Yarra Ranges Council had a thorough but straightforward application form. Send the location, proposed designs, installation method, evidence of community support, etc, all off to the Public Art Officer.

The best bit: the Public Art Officer guaranteed that they would circulate your proposal to all relevant parties and get back to you quickly (I think they said within two weeks) to confirm their support and any permits you’d require – and then they helped you with the permit process.

Our project covered lots of locations: vinyl artworks all along the Lilydale main street; a 15m2 area for buskers by the train station; road signs placed along a state highway; a hot air balloon on the roof of a building.

Council turned our application around in about a week, identified one element that would require a planning permit (that balloon!), and the Public Art Officer liaised with the Planning Department herself. Two weeks later she said they’d found a workaround where no permit was required since the balloon would only be up a couple months.

No Policy committed them to that timeline and approach. That was culture and practice.

But if anyone questions why they do it that way, it’s nice to be able to point to something like their Creative Communities Strategy:

“Our vision is to shape Yarra Ranges as a creatively vibrant place where participation in the cultural life of our communities is sustained as a seamless and deeply meaningful experience encountered in the street, our open spaces, our businesses and industry, our civic places, our schools and in our homes.” Nice.

If you get one right, I reckon make it the Practice.

But you can certainly support good practice with policies that back the staff doing the work.