Public management scholars often emphasize the importance of informal networking or boundary-spanning behavior. Teams and organizations that more frequently interact with external actors generally have more committed and better-performing public officials (Maroulis, 2017; Siciliano & Thompson, 2015), achieve more organizational learning (Siciliano, 2017), have lower turnover rates (Moynihan & Pandey, 2008), and perform better (Satheesh et al., 2023). Moreover, the fragmented and decentralized nature of service delivery in a Post-NPM era increasingly requires frontline professionals to work across organizational and professional boundaries. Effective boundary-spanning is shown to positively impact both organizational and collaborative performance.

However, despite the increasing importance and added value of (effective) network behavior, we know relatively little about the conditions that facilitate boundary-spanning or network behavior, particularly for frontline professionals. Studies on the competencies needed for effective boundary-spanning often focus on managers (Kislov, Hodgson, & Boaden, 2016). Moreover, the few studies that focus on the informal network behavior of frontline professionals, primarily look at peer-to-peer interactions, e.g., advice-seeking from colleagues (Siciliano 2017; Nisar & Maroulis 2017). The types of structure and leadership behaviors that facilitate external network activities of frontline professional across organizational and professional boundaries remain understudied (Marrone et al. 2022).

This study aims to fill this gap by focusing on the structural and behavioral antecedents of boundary-spanning behavior of frontline professionals. More concretely, we argue that professionals confronted with burdensome, time-consuming rules or procedures (i.e., red tape) have less time and energy to engage in boundary-spanning behavior. Moreover, we expect the leadership behavior of team managers to play a crucial role in the extent to which professional feel encouraged and supported to undertake boundary-spanning activities. These hypotheses are tested with data collected from a survey among social support teams in the Netherlands, measuring both the leadership intention of managers and the boundary spanning behavior and red tape perceptions of frontline professionals (n=917 professionals, n=78 teams).

The current study analyses policy perceptions of complexity by policymakers working in cross-department teams, analysing the consequences for dealing with wicked policy problems in collaborative ways within governments. Building on evidence from the UK context, our study fills in an important conceptual gap, given that depending on how cross-department collaboration is experienced by policymakers, this experience can lead into consolidating or preventing the emergence of an organisational culture able to deal with the complexity of the policy issues at hand. This means, creating the structural promise that policy actors will be able to face the complexity of wicked policy problems in the future.

The study identifies policy behaviours dealing with taming complexity or coping with complexity. Analysing these policy behaviours can help policymakers to navigate the constantly changing landscape of global policy challenges, understanding how each one of them can enable a shift towards either encouraging to explore the complexity of policy issues by coping with complexity or moving towards taming such complexity in order to, for example, encourage policy coherence. Related to this, different ways of further developing the policy capabilities needed to deal with the complexity of wicked problems are proposed and explored.

This paper examines the spread of new public governance (NPG) as a third model next to – or replacing - traditional public administration (TPA) and new public management (NPM). Literature mentions distinctive dimensions of NPG: a wide range of state and non-state actors is engaged in policy making and service delivery for social innovation (Torfing and Triantifillou, 2013); coordination involves both policy formulation and policy implementation simultaneously (Osborne, 2010); and an effective relationship between vertical levels for decentral networking (Burau and Tensenbel, 2023). We seek here theoretically and empirically to investigate how NPG manifests itself in these dimensions, with particular focus on the role(s) of the state, to understand whether NPG can be considered as a third governance model.

We study the spread of NPG both at national and devolved levels of regions. We take the Netherlands as a case that has been viewed a positive NPG example (Kickert, 1997), but also focused on managerial outcomes and public sector downsizing (Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2017). Our research questions are: To what extent have public agencies and non-state actors adopted NPG reforms in the Netherlands, how do they interact in formulating and implementing policies at multiple levels, and what is the role of the nation state in network governance?

The paper is based on two qualitative studies undertaken as part of a larger European research project conducted between 2018 and 2022. Both studies focus on labour market policy as a key welfare state area. This field is an ideal setting for studying network governance, where parties are mutually dependent for solving cross-organizational problems for social innovation, in job matching and related issues, e.g. health, education, income. The concept of 'network governance' is more appropriate here than 'policy network' because the network not only concerns public organizations, but also non-governmental parties (Klijn & Skelcher, 2007). Our first study includes 31 interviews with national partners involved in network collaboration and local partners in five labour market regions. The second study is a follow-up, in-depth analysis in a sixth region, based on 14 group interviews with 41 network partners. Policy formulation and implementation was further tracked through participation in regional network meetings over a year.

The paper contributes to the NPG (and post-NPM) literature and public policy debate about social innovation, in which NPG is often advocated, but also contested in theory and practice with having multiple meanings (Lodge & Gill, 2010; Reiter & Klenk 2019). We conclude by questioning whether NPG is a third, alternative model to TPA and NPM, as NPG operates within – and is dependent on – hierarchy and market-based incentives. In this hybrid context, local/regional NPG initiatives rely heavily on the strength of mutual relationships, but lack institutionalization to enable their spread. We therefore question the interpretation of the Netherlands as a pure NPG jurisdiction and point to the rise of a two-faced state steering both directly and indirectly and within hybrid conditions.