seven - Toward policy coordination: alternatives to hierarchy

Summary

Introduction

Coordination and coherence have been a challenge to government since the inception of government. The development of the public sector has been primarily through continuing specialisation and the creation of organisations that perform a limited number of functions (see Bouckaert, Peters and Verhoest, 2010). That pattern of development has tended to improve performance of the individual programmes, but that improvement has been bought with conflicting programmes, gaps in service, duplication, and a host of other ills that can arise from inadequate coordination in the public sector. As Aaron Wildavsky once argued, coordination has been the ‘philosophers’ stone’ for government that presumably could produce better policy and administration were it to be achieved.

Coordination can mean a variety of different things, and there are also numerous similar concepts such as coherence and policy integration. More recently the term collaboration (Chen, 2010) has been used extensively to describe patterns of organisations working together. In addition, coordination is discussed as both a process and as an outcome of that process, sometimes creating confusion. In this chapter, I will be focusing on the outcomes of processes, and will think of coordination in terms of the rather old but still useful definition supplied by Charles Lindblom. For Lindblom (1965, 15):

A set of decisions is coordinated if adjustments have been made in it such that the adverse consequences of any one decision for other decisions in the set are to a degree and in some frequency avoided, reduced, counterbalanced, or outweighed.

Although coordination has been a problem for the public sector since the creation of government, there has been an increasing emphasis on improving coordination over the past several decades. This enhanced need for coordination was at least in part in response to the impact of the New Public Management and the attendant tendency to fragment the public sector and increase the autonomy of public agencies (Verhoest et al, 2010). Governments have responded with a number of programmes, such as ‘joined up government’ in the United Kingdom (see Pollitt, 2003), with most of these programmes tending to rely upon restoring some aspects of hierarchical control over the organisations to create greater coherence.