Conference Agenda

Structures and arenas for inter-agency collaboration are often used as a means to enhance the governance capacity of public sector organizations (Christensen et al., 2016). Complex societal challenges—such as climate change and recurring crises—require horizontal coordination across departments and policy areas. These challenges are compounded by the fragmentation and “siloization” of public administration following decades of NPM reforms. The search for more robust governance arrangements has sometimes involved mergers of public organizations and a renewed interest in hierarchical modes of governance (Bouckaert, 2023; Lindholst et al., 2024). However, in cross-sectoral policy areas such as environmental policy, inter-agency collaboration remains a key strategy for improving coordination.

While inter-agency arenas are partly designed to counteract the effects of NPM reforms, they are also shaped by this very paradigm. Performance management systems, in particular, tend to target individual organizations rather than programs or horizontal goals, which creates challenges for collective efforts. This paper examines the limitations of performance management in inter-agency collaboration and seeks to identify ways to overcome these challenges. The aim is to contribute to a better understanding of how inter-agency collaboration can enhance governance capacity in administrative contexts influenced by NPM reforms.

Empirically, the paper draws on an extensive case study of the Swedish Environmental Objectives Council—a collaborative arena comprising 19 public agencies with key responsibilities for implementing environmental policy in Sweden. The agencies are represented by their Director Generals, who are mandated both to develop joint implementation initiatives and to make policy proposals to the government. The study followed the council's work over three years (fall 2020 to spring 2023), using data from participant observations at council meetings, 37 semi-structured interviews, and a document-based analysis of 115 joint initiatives.

The study reveals a pattern of “projectification” (Hodgson et al., 2019) in inter-agency collaboration, dominated by relatively short-term, ad hoc initiatives—projects—designed to align with the individual goals and performance targets of participating organizations. However, some initiatives deviated from this pattern, highlighting key factors that help mitigate the challenges of projectified collaboration. These include: (a) a focus on problem-solving within administrative structures, and (b) fostering learning and maintaining collaborative (sub-)structures. Some level of permanence is a necessary condition for inter-agency collaboration to add capacity to a governance system. The paper contributes to the literature on inter-agency collaboration (e.g., Scott & Boyd, 2020; Callens & Verhoest, 2022) by elucidating the mechanisms behind projectification and its links to performance management. It also offers policy-relevant insights into problem-solving and learning as potential starting points for initiatives aimed at strengthening collaborative arrangements.

Organizations manage reputation and pursue collaborations, but the reputation-collaboration nexus has not been systematically examined in prior studies. We use the data of 495, 384 articles on 332 central agencies in China published in the People’ s Daily from 1982 to 2019 and dynamic exponential random graph analyses to test the competing hypotheses. The results reveal that agencies scoring high on performative reputation dimensions would have more collaboration, while agencies scoring high on moral or procedural reputation dimensions would have less collaboration. Familiarity between agencies in moral and procedural reputation dimensions may drive policy collaborations, but complementarity in performative and technical reputation dimensions are also conducive to partnerships. Our findings elucidate the underlying mechanisms that shape the reputation dimensions and formation of interagency collaboration networks in China.

Public policy experiments can be defined as time-limited tests of novel policy solutions that offer information for making further policy decisions (Bravo-Biosca 2020). Experimenting with public policies has been proposed as one of the avenues for coping with increasingly complex policy environments. Despite considerable academic interest in experimenting, there is surprisingly little analysis on policy experiments from the perspective of stakeholder collaboration needed to design, implement and scale them. Although policy experiments usually involve multiple counterparts from government agencies and academic institutions to private sector partners and affected communities, they are seldom explored as interaction processes between different actors. At the same time, the success of policy experiments often depends on stakeholder coordination – identifying the crucial institutions and individuals, assuring their contribution, building joint understanding of experiment’s goals, design and evaluation, pooling financial and non-financial resources, and sharing data and expertise.

We aim to cast light on this underexplored issue by analyzing policy experiments from the perspectives of public sector coordination (Bouckaert et al. 2010) and collaborative governance (Ansell and Gash, 2008). Approached through this lens, policy experiments represent network-type collaborative endeavors. By drawing on 66 semi-structured interviews conducted with public officials in Finland and Estonia (2022-2023), we aim to study what role stakeholder coordination plays in the success of experiments, what are the special characteristics of collaboration in experimental setting, and what lessons emerge from the two countries regarding stakeholder management in policy experiments. The theoretical framework of the study draws on literatures on collaborative governance, public sector innovation, governance networks, network management, and public policy experimentation. The empirical cases can be described as most similar cases in terms of political system and openness to policy innovation, but most different in terms of public sector experience with experimenting. While Estonia is a newcomer in experimental policy making, Finland has established experience with large-scale strategic experiments. The empirical basis therefore allows to draw conclusions both on the generic aspects of stakeholder coordination in policy experimenting as well as the relevance of the differences in the extent of accumulated experimental experience in the politico-administrative systems.

References:

Ansell, C. and Gash, A. (2008). “Collaborative Governance in Theory and Practice.” Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 18(4): 543–571.

Bouckaert, G., Peters, B. G. and Verhoest, K. (2010). The Coordination of Public Sector Organizations. Shifting Patterns of Public Management. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Bravo-Biosca, A. (2020). “Experimental Innovation Policy.” Innovation Policy and the Economy 20: 191-232.

To solve complex and wicked problems in a society, attention needs to be given to diversity of actors and institutions (Alford & Head, 2017; Daviter, 2019) and to the functional structures that cross organizational boundaries and a wider ecosystem where different institutional actors work (Roth et al., 2024, p. 1). Reforms in public administration and changes in administrative methods have caused the emergence of new organizational forms, and these are commonly referred to in the research literature as "hybrids" (Skelcher & Smith, 2015, 433). The etymology of hybridity comes from biology, anthropology and technology. In general, hybridity symbolizes the process of mixing two or more things or conflicting elements through a process (Brandsen & Karré, 2011, 828). Hybrid arrangements hold great potential for addressing complex societal challenges and creating value across multiple dimensions (Roth et al., 2024). The advantage of a wider hybrid ecosystem is in its ability to utilize the conflicting goals and means of actors (Roth et al., 2024; Vakkuri & Johanson, 2018; 2021a; 2021b).

Theoretically, this paper focuses on describing key concepts and sources of hybrids through a theoretic-contextual background of structure and agency i.e. hybridity, hybridization, institutional hybridity, systemic hybridity and organizational hybridity. Five theoretical, conceptual and structural dimensions are being applied here: 1. hybridity as phenomenon, 2. hybridity as meanings, 3. hybridity as feature, 4. hybridity as structure and 5. hybridity as activities and as processes.

This is followed by a scoping review of different modes of hybridity within the social and health care setting, aiming to synthesize and widen the understanding of hybridity with the conceptualization of hybrids compared to earlier research. Specifically, this paper asks what theoretical-contextual features of hybridity can be identified in the field of social and health care and how they have been presented? Hybridity has been found to occur in many forms in the context of multi-agency within social and health care sector, where hybridity of service systems has been found to be increasing (NHS, 2014; Van Veghel, 2019). These can be public sector partnerships, quangos, service delivery structures, user-manager public spaces, collaboration forums, various social enterprises or network management systems (Kickert, 2001; Skelcher, 2005; Sørensen & Torfing, 2009).