Conference Agenda

This paper explores how government agencies strategically navigate tensions between their authorizing environments—primarily represented by parent ministries—and other prioritized stakeholders such as users, regulated institutions, and society at large. Drawing on qualitative data from in-depth interviews and a content analysis of strategic plans from three Norwegian agencies—Norwegian Agency for Quality Assurance in Education, the Norwegian Customs Authority, and the Norwegian National Security Authority (NSM)—the paper examines how agencies interpret and reconcile mandates, expectations, and performance demands in complex institutional environments.

The analysis reveals that government agencies do not merely act as neutral implementers of political goals. Instead, they engage in strategic sensemaking, often exercising discretion to align conflicting demands and resource constraints with long-term goals and societal expectations. Strategic plans function not only as internal management tools but also as boundary objects that signal alignment with political priorities while allowing room for professional autonomy. For instance, the Norwegian Agency for Quality Assurance in Education's strategy emphasizes its dual role as both regulator and developmental actor, aiming to foster educational quality while adapting to shifting expectations from the Ministry and the sector. Similarly, the Norwegian Customs Authority frames its strategy around digital transformation, risk-based operations, and organizational consolidation—balancing innovation against operational continuity, all within a political climate where politically imposed restrictions pose operational challenges. NSM, through its strategic document, articulates a broader strategic narrative in which the agency actively shapes national security policy through foresight and anticipatory governance.

These cases illustrate that strategy in the public sector increasingly involves navigating dynamic and occasionally contradictory expectations from political principals, sector stakeholders, and broader public stakeholders. The paper contributes to the discourse on public value and strategic management by arguing that agencies operate in a “strategic squeeze” that requires both responsiveness and assertiveness. As such, they may, at times, assume quasi-political roles to fulfil their mandates effectively, raising normative questions about agency autonomy and accountability in the evolving architecture of public governance. Moreover, while classical strategic management theory holds that strategy is about seizing opportunities and is a bridge to a desired future, agency strategy may also be about avoiding problems and is a buffer to the present.

In contemporary public sectors, the interplay between cognitive fragility, political short-termism and symbolic saturation is progressively narrowing the space for structured strategic change. Reform initiatives are frequently framed in terms of rupture or systemic urgency, but often fail to produce the conditions for meaningful reconfiguration. On the other hand, public managers are increasingly forced to navigate a paradox: the problems they must address are too operationally urgent to be deferred, while also too politically sensitive to be addressed openly. In this context, strategic change processes do not disappear but must relocate, unfolding within marginal, technically grounded, and institutionally protected spaces.

This paper explores how such processes develop, drawing on the case of the Lombardy Regional Healthcare Group, one of the largest public health systems in Italy, serving around 10 million residents through a network of 8 Health Protection Agencies and 26 Public Health Organizations. We focus on Benchlearning, a digital platform developed by ARIA S.p.A., the Region’s in-house agency for digital infrastructure. The platform is not part of any formal reform initiative but possesses strong strategic value due to the nature of the data it provides: internally consistent, regularly updated information on service delivery, healthcare consumption, resource allocation and patient flows. These data hold strong strategic value, since they reveal inefficiencies, territorial asymmetries and systemic misalignments, challenging dominant managerial and political paradigms.

Using a mixed-methods approach, we show how Benchlearning has been appropriated by a constellation of technical and managerial actors across the group. These actors, often located at the margins of formal hierarchies, are activating the platform as a site for professional reflection, cross-organizational dialogue, and localized planning. The platform operates not through political sponsorship or institutional mandates, but by remaining outside symbolic arenas, where it becomes possible to engage with data that are complex, politically uncomfortable, and cognitively demanding. This dynamic echoes Peters’ “politics of bureaucracy” (2001) and aligns with the concept of “bureaucratic government” (Bauer et al., 2021): in contexts where political leadership withdraws, governance must continue.

However, the same marginality that enables Benchlearning to function may also limit its capacity to consolidate. Its detachment from formal accountability frameworks may reduce its ability to influence broader governance arrangements. It remains epistemically central, but institutionally fragile.

In conclusion, we argue that the case of Benchlearning illustrates a broader condition of contemporary public management: strategic change emerges less through structured reform than through peripheral infrastructures and tacit managerial routines. In cognitively fragile environments, governing and managing increasingly involve navigating in the grey area between strategic invisibility and operational necessity. The key managerial skill becomes the ability to manage without mandate, to coordinate without full authority, and to act on knowledge that no one publicly acknowledges.