Editorial: Science or alchemy in collaborative public service? Challenges and future directions for the management and organization of joined-up government

The aim behind this Public Money & Management theme is to explore the challenges presented by increased collaboration and service integration across various parts of government. A more joined-up public service has been a policy goal of many governments dating back to the late 1990s. A number of academics have attempted to bridge this gap. From the public management perspective, notable are those writing on public innovation and governance (Ranade and Hudson, 2003; Hartley, 2005; Osborne, 2006); on collaboration (Huxham and Vangen, 2005; Sullivan and Skelcher, 2006; Cropper et al., 2011; Sullivan et al., 2013); on performance management (Bevan and Hood, 2006; Lewis, 2015); on leadership and knowledge-sharing in collaboration (Hartley and Bennington, 2006; Sullivan et al., 2012); and on systems and information management (Dunleavy et al., 2006; McLoughlin and Wilson, 2013).

Historically, the emphasis has often been on creating more coherent, user-friendly services. The think tank Demos (Perri 6, 1997), for instance, argued for an holistic government, which, it was suggested, would deliver ‘greater effectiveness within stable budgets’ (p. 9). However, although recent fiscal retrenchment has ratcheted up attention onto the issues of economy and increased targeting, the solutions for collaborative arrangements remain spookily familiar. For instance, the notion of shared services has been an accepted part of public policy and management's response for over a decade, having been a central plank of the Labour government's Transformational Government strategy (Cabinet Office, 2005). Similarly, outsourcing and public–private partnerships are well established and have often involved new types of delivery vehicle, including private limited companies or co- operatives, often making use of so-called ‘Teckal exemptions’ in procuring such arrangements. In other cases, assets such as staff, premises and technology have been shared across different bodies (public, private and third sector).

Reductions in resources across Europe have been matched with increasing the rhetoric for a shift towards collaborating to use and co- create resources, which may or may not be place-based, and towards recognizing that citizens and communities are part of the collaborative effort, not the merely the subject or target of such efforts. Again, despite the inflated claims of some commentators, notions of co-production with citizens may not be innovative in and of themselves.

In this theme, we take stock of this panoply of developments, seeking evidence of what has and has not worked. We present new ways of conceptualizing collaborative working and explore the challenges presented to public servants (and their collaborators outside of government) in building and managing the new structures and services. In many ways, we have merely scratched the surface. We review three areas of activity:

• Learning from practice.

• Current developments.

• Future challenges and opportunities.

Taken together, these highlight ongoing innovations and problem-solving in collaborative working, and provide fresh insights into the way joined-up government is evolving.

Learning from practice

In the messy reality of public management, the practices of collaboration have often run ahead of the policies of collaboration, leading to challenging relational issues between erstwhile partners. This is what Huxham and Vangen (2005) call the ‘collaboration paradox of empowerment versus thuggery’. Writers in this area have increasingly sought to understand the narratives of collaboration and the ways in which these have shaped what it is possible to talk about and therefore worth collaborating over (see Sullivan et al., 2013).

In the first section of our theme, we include pieces that describe the challenges of partnership from three very different public service contexts. First, we have a debate article from Charlotte Pell (‘Against collaboration’, see p. 4), which questions the underpinning assumptions of partnership in the public sector and whether the forms of collaboration defined by central government are ever fit for purpose.

The first paper in the theme considers the long-term efforts to integrate health and social care in England (‘What have we learnt about joint working between health and social care?’, pp. 7–14). In her paper, Ailsa Cameron seeks to synthesize the lessons learned from over 20 years of effort. She reviews the evidence for joint working in care and finds little to show that it works, despite a range of policy and management interventions with seemingly more questions than answers.

The second paper from Alex Gillett, Kim Loader, Bob Doherty and Jonathan Scott (‘A multi-organizational cross-sectoral collaboration: empirical evidence from an “Empty Homes” project’, pp. 15–22) uses the case of a project on empty housing to explore the collaboration issues that ensue when organizations work together. It neatly captures the paradox that emerges from the logics of partnership also being the roots of collaborative tensions.

Next, Alistair Bowden and Malgorzata Ciesielska (‘Ecomuseums as cross-sector partnerships: governance, strategy and leadership’, pp. 23–30) consider a relatively unresearched area in public management of the collaborations in the area of ecomuseums. Their paper makes the case for ecomuseums as a potentially rich source of learning about the roles and relationships in the governance of collaboration activity in cultural curation and of community relationships.

Current developments

Despite the fact that approaches based on information and communication technology (ICT) and shared services remain very much in vogue, there remain significant challenges in the deployment of initiatives in these areas. Pekka Valkama, Darinka Asenova and Stephen Bailey's comparative analysis of Finland and Scotland, in the context of shared services arrangements in local government, highlights the lack of understanding in the consideration of risk at both strategic and operational level (‘Risk management challenges of shared public services: a comparative analysis of Scotland and Finland’, pp. 31–38). The lack of consideration of the organizational form and structure of shared service models as key enablers of programmes—whether joint boards, or municipal enterprise arrangements or a new legal entity—is cited as part of the development required around the management of risk.

Elizabeth Eppel and Miriam Lips (‘Unpacking the black box of successful ICT- enabled service transformation: how to join up the vertical, the horizontal and the technical’, pp. 39–46) use the case of a digital government initiative for border control in New Zealand to argue the need to unpack the ‘black box’ of ICT to understand the relationship between the socio-technical elements of the technical systems and vertical and horizontal organizational network change issues.

Ally Memon and Tony Kinder (‘Changing management roles in the Scottish NHS: implications for management learning and development’, pp. 47–54) reveal the limitations of taking a laissez-faire experiential approach to the learning process of managers in the context of NHS Scotland, when charged with the delivery of more integrated health and social care. They conclude that, for improvements in collaboration to be made, a more focused approach to the development of managers is required, emphasizing the need to work on both their collective practice and the environment in which they are operating.

Future challenges and opportunities

In terms of future challenges, our final articles (both ‘new developments’) look into the future by attempting to draw on the history of public service and social welfare. Jan Myers and John Maddocks present the case for mutual forms of organizing as a way of creating the structures for collaboration, moving from the orthodox hierarchal public sector to more open and inclusive public service mutuals which have the potential to deliver to a wider set of values from across the stakeholder landscape, including, in some cases, employees (see ‘Mutual solutions to shaping public service delivery’, pp. 55–59).

Steven Parker's article (‘Reconnecting public service ethos and multi-agency collaboration. What are the possibilities and prospects for new local collaborative environments?’, pp. 61–66) invokes the long- established, but often ethereal, concept of the ‘public service ethos’—a means to re-think collaborative environments in the local sphere. Attempting to get ‘back to basics’ potentially creates a way of establishing shared meaning around, and intent for, collaboration.

Conclusions

Rather like the alchemists of medieval times, those seeking to work together appear to be working with the proposition that the policy, management and organizational base metal can be turned into collaborative partnership gold. In spite of the pressing societal challenges, ranging from climate change to the care of older people requiring significant collaborative effort, governments and those working in public management seem reluctant to look beyond short-term goals and/or reactive responses to events. Fundamental challenges remain in the collaborative design and delivery of public services. Approaches continue to insist on mimicking the architectures and practices of private sector organizations framed by business cases, target-based measurement and return on investment tools which have rendered an ecology in which collaboration ironically becomes increasingly difficult to justify without specific purpose (and therefore specific legislation and/or funding). This approach potentially works when the wider environment is well resourced, stable, ordered and predictable. However, there are few places in the world where this is actually the state of affairs.

The challenge for public service is that large, long-term centralized programme investments, where one collaboration architecture ‘size and shape’ fits all, are meeting increasing variety and innovation in architecture on the ground. The problem with bottom-up approaches is that they can be too reliant on local circumstances to meaningfully scale or sustain. Problems with both of these approaches to collaboration have been detailed in this theme, which has highlighted the continuing failure to join up across a wide range of contexts using a diversity of means.

It is time for a rethink—moving away from the approach to design which can lead to the over-integration of services reducing relationships to transactions and/or policies which have the effect of atomizing the individual (Wilson et al., 2011; McLoughlin and Wilson, 2013). This is compounded by the fact that those most in need often have complex and disjointed relations with services, coupled with the problem that those working with and in the services often have limited resources and/or tools to mediate inter-organizational relationships. To respond to these needs effectively, partnerships need to build architecture and capacity for collaboration as part of a long- term infrastructural investment, thereby creating the possibility of preserving the heterogeneity of relationships through supporting the joining up of the joining up.