Welfare Administration Reform Between Coordination and Specialization

Abstract

This article identifies transboundary coordination practices and related modes of specialization in welfare administration reforms. We describe how the 2005 reform of the welfare administration in Norway started as a process of integration involving merger and partnership, but later, following the 2008 reorganization, introduced re-centralization and re-specialization. The main research questions are how we can explain this change of administrative reform? Why was the integrative administrative reform not sustainable and reorganization through re-specialization seen as a better answer to the “wicked issues” of welfare services? To answer these questions we apply a structural-instrumental perspective and a cultural-institutional perspective.

Keywords:

• welfare administration reform
• specialization
• coordination
• post-NPM

Notes

This paper is part of the Evaluation Program of the NAV Reform and the research project “Reforming the welfare State: Democracy, accountability and Management,” funded by the Norwegian Research Council and managed by Stein Rokkan Centre for Social Studies. The research leading to these results has also received funding from the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme under grand agreement No. 266887 (Procject COCOPS), Socioeconomic Sciences & Humanities. The Norwegian part of this project is managed by the Department of administration and Organization theory, University of Bergen.