The destruction phase of public sector innovation: regulations governing school closure in Australia

In the Schumpeterian conception, innovation is the "perennial gale of creative destruction" (Schumpeter 1976 [1942], p. 84). This evolutionary process consists of two entangled but distinct forces; the creation phase and the destruction phase. This insight has been applied to non-market production. However, studies in public sector innovation are almost exclusively focused on the creation phase. This paper presents a new way of identifying mechanisms for destruction in the public sector context by analyzing the regulatory framework governing service delivery. The study presents an analysis of the regulations governing school closure in Australia, which is supplemented with an historical case study. The study finds that Ministerial discretion is the sole mechanism of school closure. It is proposed that this method of analysis is capable of being applied to other public sector services. Overall, the implication from this analysis is that an understanding of regulatory constraints is fundamental to a Schumpeterian understanding of public sector innovation.