Relational Public Services: Relationships are the foundation for better social outcomes
Most of our public services are organised around transactions, where a person presents with a need, the service offers a defined response, and the interaction is recorded and counted, which works well enough when what is needed is a passport or a licence renewal. It works far less well for the overlapping, shifting and often messy situations that characterise our lives, and where the response that helps is rarely the one that was designed in advance. Even where people do their best to provide a human-centred service, the constraints they work under mean the support comes up short of meeting the real need of the person in front of them.
What we mean by relationships
The argument at the centre of Relational Public Services is that trusting relationships and continuous learning are what produce good outcomes, rather than rigid targets and standardised processes, and that treating relationships as a nice extra on top of the real work has things the wrong way around (1).
This is not an argument for being friendlier, though there is nothing wrong with being friendly. It is closer to an observation about cause and effect: trust between two people creates the conditions in which someone can be honest about what they need, and being honest about what you need is usually where getting anywhere useful begins (2). People need to feel safe enough to express themselves, and feeling safe enough is good enough to start with (3). But it is not always easy to know what is going on for the person sitting opposite you.
Starting from the person
In practice, what changes is where you begin, working out what would help a person and building a response that fits their circumstances, rather than expecting them to fit themselves into what happens to be available.
This is more than a change of emphasis, because people are not sets of separate needs waiting to be matched to separate interventions (4). We hold several identities at once, we are embedded in families and communities, and we carry our own histories, so a service that sees only its own portion of someone's life may do its job well and still leave the person in the same position.
Haven't we been doing this already?
Anyone who has spent time in Irish public services will be thinking that we have been doing this all along, because there is a long tradition of relationship-centred practice here, and people are rightly proud of it. Professional standards in care name relational work explicitly (5), and most practitioners came into the work for precisely that reason.
What has changed is the space available for it. As regulation has increased, discretion has narrowed and documentation has grown (6), and where work is managed through performance indicators and risk, open-ended engagement gets crowded out, so people can end up feeling like a 'case' rather than a person. And cases are something that need to be 'managed'.
What gets in the way
Public-facing workers are caught in something close to a double bind (7): they are asked to be innovative and to follow the procedure, to respond to what is in front of them and to hit the target, to collaborate across services and to compete with those same services for funding, which is a difficult set of instructions to hold at once.
There is also the accumulated friction of the systems themselves, the forms, the waits, the proving of the same thing several times over, all of which drains energy and deters people from engaging. The people least able to absorb that friction are often the ones the service exists to reach (8).
What this looks like in practice
One example I know well is Enable Ireland's Virtual Adult Service, an online community running alongside the traditional in-person day services, where the people using it co-design and often lead the weekly programme of activities (9). It depends on strong relationships between staff and peers, and on skilled online facilitation, to sustain peer support and confidence-building across county boundaries, and it has created paid facilitator roles for participants. What began as local practice is now shaping a national HSE New Directions project on virtual services.
Where this is going
The Irish government has begun to explore this ground explicitly through Serving Communities, Connecting People (10), and in November 2025 a cross-departmental event brought senior officials and practitioners together to consider what relational public services might look like here, drawing on Irish projects already working this way.
This suggests that services do not need to wait for policy to arrive from the centre, and that local work can shape central thinking as much as the other way round.
If this is territory you are working in, we will be exploring all of this in more depth at the EPEx executive programme, Harnessing Relational Public Services for Better Social Outcomes, at UCD on 23 and 24 September, which I am co-facilitating with Professor Toby Lowe. To learn more, contact epex@ucd.ie.
Dr Joan O'Donnell is an Irish systems thinking expert, consultant, lecturer on the Open University's MSc Systems programme, and an advanced facilitator of Social Presencing Theatre (MIT). She is a consultant on the Empowering Policy Excellence (EPEx) Executive Education initiative at the UCD Geary Institute for Public Policy and a fellow of SCiO, the global systems practitioner organisation.
This piece draws on Reframing Public Services in Ireland as a Relational Practice, written with Toby Lowe, Gabriel Eichsteller and Adele O'Neill and published by UCD Geary Institute for Public Policy in March 2026 (11).
References
1. Lowe, T., French, M., Hawkins, M., Hesselgreaves, H., & Wilson, R. (2020). New development: Human learning systems, public service for complexity, uncertainty and citizen-centred public services. Public Money & Management, 40(3), 193-196. See also Denhardt, J., & Denhardt, R. (2007). The new public service: Serving not steering. M.E. Sharpe.
2. Lowe, T., & French, M. (2021). Leading public service systems: Human learning systems in practice. Centre for Public Impact. On mattering, belonging and agency, see O'Donnell, J. (2024). Safe virtual space: Taking a practice turn in psychological safety, towards systemically viable and sustainable disability supports. Doctoral dissertation, National University of Ireland Maynooth.
3. O'Donnell, J. Homeostats for a risk society: relational systems and psychological safety in practice. Risk Society. https://www.risk-society.com/homeostats-for-a-risk-society-relational-systems-and-psychological-safety-in-practice/
4. Bovaird, T., & Loeffler, E. (2012). From engagement to co-production: The contribution of users and communities to outcomes and public value. Voluntas, 23(4), 1119-1138.
5. CORU. (2020). Standards of proficiency. CORU, Health and Social Care Professionals Council.
6. Lipsky, M. (2010). Street-level bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the individual in public services (30th anniversary ed.). Russell Sage Foundation. See also Murphy, M. (2022). Discretion at the frontline of homeless service administration. Doctoral thesis, University College Cork.
7. Bateson, G. (1972). Steps to an ecology of mind. Chandler.
8. Lades, L., Johnson, J., & O'Connor, R. (2022). Sludge in Irish policymaking. PublicPolicy.ie. See also Samahita, M., & Lades, L. K. (2026). Reducing friction, promoting fairness: Behavioural perspectives on sludge in Irish public services. PublicPolicy.ie.
9. Enable Ireland. Virtual Adult Service. https://enableireland.ie/services/adult-services/virtual-adult-service
10. Government of Ireland. (2026). Serving communities, connecting people: A relational public service approach.
11. O'Donnell, J., Lowe, T., Eichsteller, G., & O'Neill, A. (2026). Reframing public services in Ireland as a relational practice. UCD Geary Institute for Public Policy. https://publicpolicy.ie/papers/reframing-public-services-in-ireland-as-a-relational-practice/
