Joined-up government: rational administration or bureaucratic politics?

Description/Abstract

Joined-up government is often viewed as a remedy for coordination
problems arising in the complex multi-organisational terrain of contemporary public
services. Governments extol the virtues of formal coordination mechanisms as tools
of joined-up government, both locally and centrally. Such policy exhortations
conceive of joined-up government from a rational-administrative perspective which
implies that actors adopt coordination mechanisms as a functional response to
systemic problems. This paper explores the rationale behind the selection of
coordination mechanisms from the perspective of policy actors at different levels of
government, using evidence from a recent study of joined-up government in the field
of homelessness. It is argued that decisions about joining-up are the outcome of
strategic and instrumental moves between actors, with each pursuing their own
organisational interests and the outcome favouring the most powerful, motivations
that are better encapsulated by a bureaucratic politics model. Key aspects dominating
collaborative decision-making include prioritisation of, and a desire to protect
resources for, agencies’ and departments’ own client groups; the greater ability of the
most powerful actors to gain the cooperation of other bodies in order to advance their
own organisational agendas; and the adoption of coordination mechanisms to reduce
risk and maintain organisational survival