In many developed countries, the provision of disability services has undergone significant transformations, from institutional to community based care, and from organisational to personalised funding. Yet delivering disability support remains an ongoing challenge for governments. Specifically, the relative success of different types of disability support governance is convoluted and problematic given the diversity and complexity of disability support systems and the people they serve.
To enhance the systematic analysis and evaluation of disability support governance, this paper conceptually advances four distinct models based on the locus of control and coordination. Using illustrations from case studies of individuals receiving care, the identification of these ideal types enables their relative strengths, weaknesses, and the occasions of governance failure to be articulated.
Furthermore, the paper presents a novel approach to visualising actual disability support arrangements as social networks. The utility of such visualisations for analysing individual and systemwide arrangements is outlined. In the context of Australia’s developing National Disability Insurance Scheme, these conceptual and analytical developments are argued to be important tools for policy and service analysis and reform.