Social services policy and delivery in Australia: centre–periphery mixes

English The development of social services policy and the delivery of those attendant services have come to occupy a core role for modern governments. The modes of policy development and service delivery and their coordination have shifted between centralised models operated by decision-making elites and a peripheral model in which government divests some level of authority and responsibility for the development and implementation of social services policy to community-based actors and organisations. Changing policy stances bring these models and their associated coordination principles into dominance at different points in history and, importantly, problematise social services policy making and delivery through the continued existence of residual aspects of these multiple approaches.