Eleanor Malbon

Eleanor Malbon
  • Bachelor of Arts/Science
  • PostDoc Position at Australian National University

About

50
Publications
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1,410
Citations
Introduction
Current institution
Australian National University
Current position
  • PostDoc Position

Publications

Publications (50)
Article
The administrative burden literature has demonstrated a variety of ways in which administrative burdens can act as barriers to citizens accessing services to which they are entitled. This paper connects these insights to ideas from the Capabilities Approach to Human Development to articulate the ways that administrative burdens can be understood as...
Article
Market mechanisms have emerged as a dominant approach in the provision of public welfare services, most notably in sectors such as disability care, aged care, and health care. While this shift promises potential benefits such as improved efficiency, enhanced service quality, and increased consumer support, it also presents significant challenges ar...
Article
Market stewardship of social care quasi-markets has been an important area of inquiry. While most focus has been on central government stewardship, local level actors can also play a role. Using a case study of the Australian National Disability Insurance scheme, this article focuses on both how service providers can be market stewards and whether...
Article
The use of markets has a long history in the delivery of social services. Market‐based arrangements are used worldwide with the goal of increasing choice, efficiency, and cost effectiveness in public service delivery. However, government‐run markets or ‘quasi‐markets’ do not behave as regular markets and therefore require interventions and stewards...
Article
The use of quasi‐markets for the delivery of social care continues to grow internationally. This has presented considerable challenges regarding governance and stewardship of these markets, to ensure they meet policy goals. To date, both scholarship and practice on quasi‐market stewardship have mainly focused on the role of government. However, non...
Article
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As market‐based responses to social care have grown in popularity across the world, the need for good stewardship of social care quasi‐markets is increasingly becoming a concern for governments. The market stewardship literature has focused almost exclusively on the role of government and central agencies. However, non‐government actors also play a...
Article
Quasi-market approaches to social care provision are being utilized across the world, with stewardship of these markets becoming an area of interest and concern for governments and scholars. The market-stewardship literature mainly focuses on the role of central governing bodies, however non-government actors also play important stewardship roles....
Article
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In recent years there has been growing interest in the policy community to apply insights from system dynamics modelling to address the complexity of many policy issues. This, however, has occurred in parallel to recent developments in critical scholarship on the nature of evidence use within public policymaking. While system dynamics aims to assis...
Article
Full-text available
Background Researchers and policymakers are increasingly concerned that personalisation schemes in social and health care might be worsening social and health inequities. This has been found internationally, where better outcomes from such schemes have been found amongst those who have higher education and more household income. Method This study...
Article
Analysis of the welfare state emphasises that access to social security support is a key component of the relationship between the state and the citizen. Recent literature has identified administrative burden as a concept that helps us to understand an emerging dynamic between the state and the citizen, where citizens must deal with increasingly on...
Article
Previous research has indicated that administrative burdens are particularly high in personalised funding schemes such as the Australian National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), because these schemes are predicated on very high levels of self-advocacy. Administrative burdens tend to be inequitably distributed, thereby entrenching existing socia...
Article
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Background Care services in industrialized nations are increasingly moving towards individualized funding models, which aim to increase individuals’ flexibility, choice and control over their services and supports. Recent research suggests that such schemes have the potential to exacerbate inequalities, however none has explored gendered dimensions...
Article
Over the past three decades social inequality has risen in almost all OECD countries, reaching historical highs. Social inequality is created and maintained not just by the specific focus or goals of particular policies, but by the norms, values and processes of our government institutions. This special issue looks at how administrative burden is c...
Chapter
The National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) has experienced a range of high-profile implementation challenges. In this chapter, we explore these challenges through the lens of historical institutionalism, demonstrating that their source is in fact common among many reforms. We suggest that the NDIS has become a hybrid scheme, encompassing some...
Article
Over the last 30 years, governments have sought to give citizens greater choice and control of the public services they utilise. As a result, we have seen the creation of various forms of public sector markets, including through contracting and tendering processes and, more recently, by utilising individualised or ‘personalised’ care budgets. Under...
Article
Care systems worldwide regularly undergo reforms and adjustments in the hope of system improvements. In many ways this can align with calls for governments to be more ‘adaptive’ and ‘agile’ to changing care demands. However, such continued adaptations can create turbulence for the care sectors in question. In this article, we examine the large‐scal...
Article
Background: Many countries use market forces to drive reform across disability supports and services. Over the last few decades, many countries have individualised budgets and devolved these to people with disability, so that they can purchase their own choice of supports from an available market of services. Key points for discussion: Such individ...
Article
Markets are increasingly used by governments to deliver social services, underpinned by the belief that they can drive efficiency and quality. These ‘quasi-markets' require on-going management to ensure they meet policy goals, and address issues of market inequity. This has seen debates emerge around ‘market stewardship' and ‘market shaping’ that c...
Preprint
Full-text available
Researchers and policymakers are increasingly concerned that personalisation schemes in social and health care might be worsening social and health inequities. This has been found internationally, where better outcomes from such schemes have been found amongst those who have higher education and more household income. This study looks at one of the...
Article
The Australian Productivity Commission (PC) is an inquiry body of international renown, which Australian governments engage to obtain objective evidence‐informed recommendations regarding a wide range of policy issues. Despite its prominence in the Australian policy landscape, there has been little empirical investigation into its practices. This s...
Article
Full-text available
With the rise in popularity of market‐based responses to social policy challenges, the stewardship of quasi‐markets or public service markets, is a key concern for governments worldwide. Debates about how to manage quasi‐markets have focussed on high‐level decision‐making processes. However local actors, in particular street level bureaucrats, are...
Article
Australia is currently undergoing significant social policy reform under the introduction of a personalized scheme for disability services: the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS). This article explores the growing administrative burdens placed on disability providers operating under the new scheme, using an Australia-wide survey of the dis...
Article
Full-text available
The use of quasi-markets in diverse areas of social and health care has grown internationally. This has been accompanied by a growing awareness of how governments can manage these markets in order to meet their goals, with a range of terms emerging to encapsulate this such as market “shaping”, “stewarding” or “steering”. The task is further complic...
Article
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Background: Personalisation is a growing international policy paradigm that aims to create both improved outcomes for individuals, and reduce fiscal pressures on government, by giving greater choice and control to citizens accessing social services. In personalisation schemes, individuals purchase services from a 'service market' using individual...
Article
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This study focuses on the agency of governments engaged in implementation processes that take place over a number of years and through multiple stages. The long timeframes associated with staged implementation leave reforms vulnerable to the institutional effects that may ultimately derail policy aspirations. Governments engaged in staged implement...
Article
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Background The connection between choice, control and health is well established in the literature on the social determinants of health, which includes choice and control of vital health and social services. However, even in the context of universal health and social care schemes, the ability to exercise choice and control can be distributed unequa...
Article
In this article, we identify the unfolding unintended consequences which flow from one instance of policy layering in Australia's National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS). We show how use of a causal diagram, which highlights feedback loops and emergent properties, to map complex chains of causal factors can assist policy scholars and policy pra...
Chapter
In sketching out a vision for the future public service, Dickinson and Sullivan (2014) argued that we were at the frontier of significant change. These changes, they suggested, would pose challenges to the way in which we think about what the public service workforce does and how it goes about doing it. A key part of the discussion of the future pu...
Article
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As the Australian National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) progresses through its implementation, calls for stewardship of the new disability market increase. As a personalisation scheme, the condition of the disability service markets is tied to the ability for people with disability to access care services. Market conditions such as thin marke...
Article
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We explore personalized funding schemes and associated changes for accountability within new welfare governance reforms. Using the case of the Australian National Disability Insurance Scheme as hybrid institution, requiring mixed accountability arrangements, we examine the implications for broader discussions of accountability in personalized welfa...
Article
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Abstract We give a short overview of feminist perspectives on the use of evidence in policy making, covering both empirical and conceptual work. We present the case of the Conflict Tactics Scale, a measure of interpersonal violence that is both widely used and heavily criticised in work on violence between intimate partners. We examine this case to...
Article
As governments worldwide turn to personalised budgets and market-based solutions for the distribution of care services, the care sector is challenged to adapt to new ways of working. The Australian National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) is an example of a personalised funding scheme that began full implementation in July 2016. It is presented...
Article
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Pollitt and Hupe have identified the emergence of “magic concepts” in public administration and policy. These concepts are seductive but do not solve – and often render invisible – important policy challenges. In highlighting the role of magic concepts, Pollitt and Hupe demonstrate the importance of linguistic battles within the bureaucracies. In t...
Article
As part of the international trend towards personalisation, in 2013 Australia launched a major disability scheme aiming to give participants greater choice and control over services. The scheme aims to cover a wide diversity of disabilities, services and significant geographical area – resulting in a highly complex system of local overlapping marke...
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Introduction Systems thinking has emerged in recent years as a promising approach to understanding and acting on the prevention and amelioration of non-communicable disease. However, the evidence on inequities in non-communicable diseases and their risks factors, particularly diet, has not been examined from a systems perspective. We report on an a...
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Background Increasing attention is being given to political agenda setting for the social determinants of health. While designing policies that can improve the social determinants of health is critical, so too is ensuring these policies are appropriately administered and implemented. Many policies have the potential to entrench or even expand inequ...
Article
Significant restructuring of bureaucracies has occurred to facilitate joined-up working. This article draws on new institutionalism to explore the rationale behind the use of structural change for the promotion of joined-up working. It argues that a strong institutionalized myth has emerged which has created isomorphic pressures in the public secto...
Article
Personalized care and market-based approaches to public service provision have gained prominence in a range of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries. Australia has recently joined this trend, launching a complex and expansive programme of individualized care funding for disability through the National Disability Insurance...
Article
Australia's National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) represents the latest in a worldwide shift towards individualised funding models for the delivery of care services. However, market-based models for care deliveries bring new considerations and dilemmas for accountability. Drawing on previous work by Dickinson et al. (2014), we examine a range...
Article
It is well established in the public management literature that boundary spanners – people or groups that work across departments or sectors – are critical to the success of whole of government and joined-up working. In studying recent unprecedented change to central government agencies in the Australian context, our research identified that intra-...
Article
Lifestyle drift is increasingly seen as a barrier to broad action on the social determinants of health. The term is currently used in the population health literature to describe how broad policy initiatives for tackling inequalities in health that start off with social determinants (upstream) approach drift downstream to largely individual lifesty...
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Objectives This paper reports on findings from a systematic review designed to investigate the state of systems science research in public health. The objectives were to: (1) explore how systems methodologies are being applied within public health and (2) identify fruitful areas of activity. Design A systematic review was conducted from existing li...
Article
Full-text available
Inequalities in the social determinants of health (SDH), which drive avoidable health disparities between different individuals or groups, is a major concern for a number of international organisations, including the World Health Organization (WHO). Despite this, the pathways to changing inequalities in the SDH remain elusive. The methodologies and...
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Higher education institutions are considered by many to be pivotal in shaping the next generation of thinkers and practitioners required to further work towards addressing the sustainability challenges faced by contemporary societies. The extent to which higher education has embraced this responsibility is debateable. Notwithstanding, this article...

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