The facilitators of interagency working in the context of European public service reform

ABSTRACT

This article provides an overview of key lessons about the governance and leadership of interagency working in multi-level contexts. The article is based on interviews with local and national leaders across Europe. This topic is timely given the complexity of European public sector governance which demands leadership, co-production, and styles of collaboration which promote partnership-working within local contexts. We highlight that localism is central but this still requires national political leadership for localism to be managed and delivered effectively. In other words, empowerment-heavy models of governance, without top-down support, risks interagency ineffectiveness or even failure. We argue that leadership at macro, meso and micro levels of the governance system is required in order for successful interagency working to be delivered. We find that removing the barriers to interagency working requires the identification of an interagency leader (and to even enshrine this within statute), clear roles and lines of accountability for professionals, a breakdown of disciplinary silos, non-tokenistic bottom-up approaches, national public service leadership which promotes capacity building, and the dovetailing of planning and evaluation. The article concludes by proposing strategies for developing effective multi-level interagency working.

KEYWORDS:

• Interagency
• public sector reform
• reform
• Europe
• governance
• integration

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors

John Connolly is a Professor of Public Policy at the University of the West of Scotland.

Jacqueline Barnes is an Emerita Professor at Birckbeck University and Honorary Research Fellow at Oxford University.

Joana Guerra is Professor of Social Policy at the University of Coimbra.

Robert Pyper is an Emeritus Professor in Government and Public Policy at the University of the West of Scotland.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

The ISOTIS project received funding from Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Framework Programme [grant number 727069]. The Scottish health and social care study received funding from the Scottish Improvement Science Collaborating Centre.