http://hdl.handle.net/10453/19979 2026-06-23T14:09:11Z http://hdl.handle.net/10453/195453 Title: Social Procurement Policies in Government Construction Contracts: Law, Policy and Practice Authors: Bell, Rhonda Therese Abstract: This research addresses the persistent implementation gap between social procurement policy objectives and their practical execution in government construction contracts. Governments increasingly use procurement as a strategic tool to achieve broader societal outcomes, with many mandating that construction firms employ people from disadvantaged populations in government infrastructure projects. While significant barriers to successful implementation have been identified in both Australian and international research, this study is situated in the Australian context, focusing on improving the implementation of requirements to employ people from disadvantaged groups and create social value under social procurement policies in government construction contracts. This study explores how policy aspirations could be better translated throughout the public procurement process. To do so, this research investigates three key stages of procurement policy implementation: policy documentation and application, the tender phase, and project implementation. Twenty-three semi-structured interviews were conducted with a diverse range of stakeholders from New South Wales and Victoria. To gain a deeper understanding of the context and nature of social procurement policies, this study also analysed policy documents and associated government material from both states, enabling a comparison of their contrasting policy approaches. The research informs policy by identifying the institutional and procedural reforms necessary to enhance policy-led procurement. Rather than relying on vague, open-ended contractual requirements, employment and social value obligations should be clearly articulated in tender documentation, with firms competing on the basis of their implementation plans. The base weighting of social criteria in tender evaluations should be increased, and greater transparency applied to non-cost assessments. Governments should move beyond lowest-price contract awards and reject the assumption that social procurement implementation is cost-free. It is insufficient for governments to assert that these policies are important without putting proper contractual measures in place to ensure their successful implementation. At the project level, this study distinguishes between internal and external policy intermediaries and presents a new analytical framework that establishes the foundation for developing typologies in future social procurement research. The research recommends increased government funding for external policy intermediaries. The study makes a theoretical contribution by integrating Agency Theory and Systems Theory to examine implementation dynamics. It extends the public administration literature by identifying principal–agent problems across the three key stages of procurement. Systems Theory further highlights leverage points at each stage of implementation, identifying specific incentive structures that can drive more effective contractual and policy outcomes. Description: University of Technology Sydney. Faculty of Business. 2025-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10453/195452 Title: Urban water and sanitation in Siem Reap, Cambodia: a transdisciplinary case study informing the inclusive and systemic planning of heterogeneous service provision configurations Authors: Ross, Simon J. Abstract: Within cities of low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), the heterogeneity of demand for water and sanitation services contributes to persistent inequalities in how the benefits and costs of managing urban water resources are distributed. A need for planning approaches that accommodate the bottom-up, demand-driven provision of mixes of service provision models has long been evident. A more holistic understanding of the complexity of existing heterogeneous infrastructure configurations and the diverse perspectives from which they are understood is essential for planning a transition to citywide inclusive services. Conceptual frameworks supporting endogenous urban water and sanitation planning have been established and refined over several decades. This thesis aims to validate a practical methodology that frames urban water and sanitation planning as a flexible action-oriented learning process that may be adapted to be culturally feasible and context specific. The thesis is structured as three transdisciplinary cycles of action-oriented learning. The first focuses on the problematical situation of applying comparative economic analysis methodologies to prioritise interventions in heterogeneous urban water and sanitation configurations. This research has scoped and synthesised fragmented least-cost economic principles from the related literature to devise evaluative criteria for appraising and enhancing least-cost methodologies, thereby addressing limitations experienced by water and sanitation professionals. The second learning cycle organised for the problematical situation of heterogeneous water and sanitation configurations to be observed from diverse issue-owner perspectives in a real-world case study. Knowledge was generated through a heterogeneous residential end-use water demand analysis, and various soft system models as learning devices, to explore their potential in shifting how societal actors and water and sanitation professionals think about service provision in Siem Reap, Cambodia, and prompt actions to improve it. The third learning cycle sought to think through how the use of these models may be integrated and organised as a systemic planning approach for Siem Reap municipality, with relevance to other comparable cities in the Asia Pacific, and globally. Evaluative criteria from the first learning cycle were applied to strengthen this deliberation. This thesis presents a discussion to lead thinking on planning frameworks that embrace the complexity of heterogeneous urban water and sanitation configurations. It argues that the role of planners is to be genuinely curious about possible endogenous solutions emerging from within this problematical situation. Organising gentle, collaborative interrogation of such purposeful models for change is key to organising water and sanitation as citywide inclusive public services. Description: University of Technology Sydney. Institute for Sustainable Futures. 2025-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10453/195450 Title: From British Nationality to Political Resistance: BN(O) Status and the Vision for a Hong Kong Crown Dependency Authors: Wong, Ka Hang Abstract: On June 30, 2020, the Chinese government imposed the National Security Law in Hong Kong following prolonged protests. The Chinese imposition violated the agreements on freedoms and autonomy stated in the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration. To redress this violation, the British government has offered British National (Overseas) (BN(O)) passport holders of Hong Kong a bespoke visa route to British citizenship. The purpose of this study was to provide a historical analysis of BN(O) status and how it evolved from being a token of British nationality into a tool of political resistance against a totalitarian party-state’s assault on Hong Kong. Through examination of the documents, the study discovered that under the British Nationality Act 1981 (UK), the British government took a racial demarcation policy and divided British nationality into classes to prevent mass emigration to the United Kingdom. The study found BN(O) status was regarded as a political compromise. On the one hand, it offered its holders some kind of connection with the United Kingdom beyond the handover; on the other, it reflected the British domestic pressures of an imagined “White Britain” community. Britain sees China’s violation of the Joint Declaration as just cause for retracting its 1984 agreement to hand over its people to the totalitarian party-state in 1997. This retraction is achieved by extending the rights of BN(O)s and opening the door to them to live in Britain from January 31, 2021. The study finds that the BN(O) offer serves two distinct purposes. First, the offer attracts capital and talent in the post-Brexit era while minimising public expenditure due to the “no recourse to public funds” clause of the visa. Second, the BN(O) scheme is a delayed fulfilment of British responsibility towards Hongkongers. Drawing parallels with Tibetan history, this thesis suggests that the British government could address its unfulfilled promise of universal suffrage for Hongkongers by supporting a government-in-exile and granting land as a self-governing Crown Dependency. It draws synergy between contemporary discussions on a new Hong Kong and the concept of a global representative platform for Hongkongers to make the argument. Description: University of Technology Sydney. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. 2026-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10453/195448 Title: Longitudinal Health Transformer for Cancer Pathways Modelling Authors: Gerrard, Leah B. Abstract: The success of artificial intelligence in modelling complex data, from natural language to visual inputs, has inspired its application to healthcare. In cancer care, the cancer pathway consists of a sequence of longitudinal health data that combines development of the disease with interactions between patients and various healthcare providers. Modelling both the disease progression and human interactions within cancer pathways remains a significant challenge. As a result, there is a pressing need for approaches that can better capture and understand complex cancer data and pathways for unified solutions. This includes considering the unique characteristics of cancer pathways being multi-outcome, captured within various data sources, and often suffering from limited data and labels. To address these issues, this research focuses on developing deep learning-based methods for cancer pathways modelling, utilising transformer-based models with longitudinal health data. A series of models are proposed that leverage strategies including multi-task learning; longitudinal patient modelling; and transfer learning; that are tailored to the cancer context. Experimental testing of these models demonstrates their ability to improve predictions for cancer patients and provide more effective, flexible, and data-efficient approaches. This work illustrates the value of the Transformer in capturing intricate relationships between cancer patients and the healthcare system, offering a promising foundation for advancing the modelling of cancer pathways and improving the care and outcomes for cancer patients. Description: University of Technology Sydney. Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology. 2025-01-01T00:00:00Z