Flip the script on policy making - exploring an indigenous-led, place-based learning approach
April 2025
The Lab
In March we had the opportunity to be part of the Digital Kick off for the Creative Bureaucracy Festival, one of the world’s largest public sector innovation events. Hosted out of Berlin, The Lab’s 90 minute session was one of 15 online workshops, from 15 different countries.
Flip the script on policy making - exploring an indigenous-led, place-based learning approach was a workshop designed to share key aspects of Niho Taniwha, The Lab’s framework for tracking learning and systems impact.
Niho Taniwha aims to help shift public sector commissioning, policy and capability towards 'bottom-up' ways of working. Niho Taniwha centres mātauranga Māori and indigenous ways of knowing, in combination with western knowledge and the lived experience of families and communities.
Public servants are familiar with evaluation methodologies that focus on individual interventions. Niho Taniwha extends this scope, to support collective learning across multiple place-based innovation activities and identify the system’s conditions needed to support effective local responses. It emphasises that the responsibility for actioning learning and evidence for change sits not just with communities but also within the public sector system. Adopting Niho Taniwha practice, means public sector teams become partners in a learning and implementation process. This flips the script on policy-making which is usually led top down and from a distance to communities. Policy makers and advisors are part of a live learning and feedback process working from the ground up.
In this short international workshop, the goal was to introduce key dimensions of Niho Taniwha practice and framework, specifically:
The mātauranga behind the terms Niho Taniwha
The three dimensional form of Niho Taniwha
The whāriki or foundations of the learning process, namely tikanga (cultural protocols), values and evidence - emphasising that evidence in this context prioritises indigenous knowledge and lived experience as well as western framed evidence
The three wāhi ako or learning levels, and the learning questions and workflow that sit within these levels.
A key take out from the session feedback was that for many, the framing of the whāriki was a new way of thinking and challenged people to stop and consider what tikanga and values were in their context.
We also acknowledged that 90 minutes wasn’t long enough to introduce the framework and demonstrate the relationship with shifting policy making practice beyond some short examples. We look forward to being able to run some longer sessions later in the year to explore and demonstrate this further.
You can watch the webinar and download a copy of the slide deck here: https://www.aucklandco-lab.nz/presentations/flipping-the-script-on-top-down-policy-making-webinar
For more information see:
Creative Bureaucracy Festival - https://creativebureaucracy.org/
Niho Taniwha - https://www.aucklandco-lab.nz/niho-taniwha
