Joined-up government: rational administration or bureaucratic politics?

Moseley, Alice (2009) Joined-up government: rational administration or bureaucratic politics? Public Administration Committee Annual Conference, Pontypridd, UK. 06 - 08 Sep 2009.

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

This record has no associated files available for download.

Contributors

Download statistics