Getting The Basic Right: A Case of Problem Framing in the Public Sector

ABSTRACT The Global Innovation Index or GII was launched in 2007 has provided a great emphasis on measuring the climate and infrastructure for innovation and on assessing related outcomes. One of its sub pillars is to reflects on perceptions of the quality of public service and the quality of policy formulation as well as implementation and in the last three years; 2019 – 2021, ranked Malaysia at 37, 30 and 33 consecutively. Despite being the third highest country among her ASEAN counterparts, after Singapore and Brunei, the country is still ranked low in the political, regulatory and business environments indexes, consistently at number 40, 40 and 41, Hence, this paper is to explore the nature of problem framing process in designing policy within a Malaysian government institution through a hermeneutic phenomenological approach. Data of this paper is gathered qualitatively from one of the Malaysia’s public agencies through a series of in-depth interviews with its group of policy makers to showcase the lived experiences of policy makers in the process of designing and formulating policies. This paper is to illuminate the process of how a problem framing is done in a public agency in Malaysia by adopting a set of frame creation model designed by Dorst (2015), the key challenges faced by the policy makers and key recommendations to improve the design and process of policy making in the public sector to ensure better implementation. The research provides a set of structure the problem framing process of the agency. Keywords: Public sector, Framing, Design strategy, Malaysian public agency