Policy failure is typically treated as a single phenomenon: the shortfall between a government’s intentions and its achievements. This paper argues that failure is not homogeneous, and that its varieties can be specified within a strategic-relational account of the interplay between structure and agency. Drawing on elite interviews with former New South Wales Ministers who held office between 2011 and 2022, this paper distinguishes two modes of executive policy failure, each arising from a distinct form of misalignment between reflexive agential strategy and structural strategic selectivity. The first, failed implementation, occurs where a reform is announced and briefly enacted before being reversed by structural counter-mobilisation; it is illustrated through the attempted prohibition of greyhound racing under the Baird government. The second, pre-emptive non-decision, occurs where a reform is never seriously attempted because the anticipated activation of structural causal power renders the attempt politically infeasible; it is illustrated through the continuation of native forest logging across successive NSW governments. The paper connects these failure modes to longstanding debates on the second and third faces of power, and argues that the strategic-relational approach supplies the ontologically explicit account of the structure–agency dialectic that the power and policy-failure literatures have lacked. Distinguishing the two modes matters, because they carry different theoretical and practical implications: the former reveals the limits of reflexive agency under sustained structural pressure, the latter the conditions under which structures discipline reflexivity before it can mobilise.
