Mandated collaboration between public organizations

Project summary

Introduction

A mandated collaboration is a case where a third-party organization is attempting to impose collaboration on other organizations within its range of influence.  Hence, we can understand mandated collaboration as a particular type of collaborative governance. Collaborative governance has been defined as patterns of government and governing where organizations “are brought together to govern society, contribute to public value, implement public policy or manage public programs or assets in a collaboration arrangement” (Vangen et al., 2014).

Many of the authors on governance underline that governance increasingly is performed through a horizontal relationship between the organizations involved, replacing traditional government through hierarchical links. Other authors maintain that much of the collaborative governance that we undoubtedly witness within the public sector takes place “in the shadow of hierarchy” (Scharpf, 1993).  When state actors use collaborative governance arrangements to implement a policy or manage a public program, they also may have the power to enforce participation, create and change the rules for the collaboration, and to provide incentives for participating actors. This makes it relevant to talk about much of the collaborative governance within the public sector as a hybrid kind of governance where multiple modes of coordination are involved (Rodríguez et al., 2007). Horizontal relationships do not simply replace hierarchies. Rather, the situation is that these modes of coordination interact in complex ways, and it is a challenge for governance research to achieve a better understanding of this complexity.

 

Purpose

The purpose of the project is to develop a framework for analyzing the dynamics and outcomes of mandated collaboration between organizations in the public sector, and to employ this framework in empirical analyses of public reforms. The intention is to use the framework to analyse the Norwegian local government reform and the Coordination reform in the health sector. However, the ambition is to develop a framework also suited to study other kind of mandated collaboration in the public sector, and for comparative studies.

 

Project organization and collaboration

This project is financed by Sogn og Fjordane University College through the strategic research program “Samhandling, innovasjon og styring i offentleg sektor” and a separate research grant for the subproject “Mellom nærleik og ekspertise – tenesteorganisering og kvalitet i samhandlingsreforma.”

The Norwegian Research Council finances data collection on the local government reform through the project “Reshaping the Map of Local and Regional Self-Government. A study of the Norwegian Local Government Reform processes 2014–2019.” UNI Rokkan is leading partner in this project, which is a cooperative project involving a number of Norwegian and Nordic social scientists and research institutions. Oddbjørn Bukve participates from SFUC. The project has an own homepage here:  https://wpms.computing.uni.no/evakom/presentation-in-english/