LIST OF WORKSHOPS

This workshop addresses four related research questions:

1.     Why did different governments around the world enacted reforms to integrate and coordinate public policies and administrative units from different policy sectors?

2.     What are the mechanisms that explain cross-country and cross-sector differences in reform patterns?

3.     What are the relations between the policy and the administrative dimensions of public sector reforms?

4.     In which contexts are these reforms considered successful in dealing with the policy challenges they are addressing and when is this not the case?

These research questions are relevant for the following reasons. Since the early 1980s, researchers have pointed at the delegation of competencies away from the central government to subnational governments (Hooghe et al. 2016; Hooghe and Marks 2016), private organizations and independent regulators (Maggetti 2007; Gilardi 2008), as well as international organizations (Hooghe et al. 2017). In the public administration literature, scholars have observed that these processes of delegation went along with New Public Management (NPM) reforms, implying the disaggregation of public sector structures, contractualisation, and more reliance on private actors to deliver public services (Hood 1991). At the same time, other scholars in the public administration literature have pointed out that NPM reforms came along with a strengthening of the central state and national bureaucracies. Precisely, this literature has referred to the steering state (Peters 2001), steering from the centre (Dahlström et al. 2011), the self-care of the state (Bezes 2009), and coordination inside the public sector (Bouckaert et al. 2010) to denote the reinforced power of the bureaucracy. Other authors have observed a turn towards integration and coordination of different policy instruments and related administrative units during the same period. Therein, scholars have referred to analytical terms, such as joined-up government (6 2004), policy integration (Briassoulis 2004), whole-of-government (Christensen and Laegreid 2007), or functional regulatory spaces (Varone et al. 2013) to emphasize a type of reform that coordinated or integrated elements from a variety of policy sectors. These literatures overlap to some extent (Tosun and Lang 2017) and focus on a similar core issue, namely on how states have reorganized different policy fields and on the relationships between these fields in the context of a changing nature of the state as well as with respect to the emergence of new policy challenges, such as environmental concerns, new public health challenges, or migration crises.

This workshop aims at bringing together the policy-oriented side and the public administration side of this research tradition. Against this background, we invite papers that move this literature forward in making contributions such as the following: i.) comparative analyses of reforms that integrate and coordinate policies and/or administrative units across different countries and/or policy fields; ii.) papers that conceptualize and examine the conditions or mechanisms that explain such reforms across sectors and countries; iii.) comparative analyses that analyze failed or successful reforms of policy integration and coordination in dealing with the policy challenge at hand. In principle, papers can have a theoretical or an empirical focus but preferences will be given to papers that use original comparative empirical material. The overarching goal of the workshop is to better connect research on the policy and on the administrative dimension of coordination, one to another, and, respectively, both to the wider governance literature.

Previous researchers have pointed out factors that constrain integration and coordination of policy sectors (Peters 2015; Vince 2015; Candel 2017). For example, limited capacities and resources, insufficient political commitment, blame avoidance, and turf wars between governmental sectors or levels constrain the coordination and integration of policy sectors. On the other hand, other conditions tend to enable policy integration, such as the presence of institutional structures that connect governmental sectors and levels, the presence of a shared policy frame, and sustained political leadership (Peters 2015; Trein 2017). The relative importance of these factors as well as how they can be fostered remains an open question, however. The contributions to be invited to this workshop should use or build on these explanatory factors to derive hypotheses or speculate about the mechanisms that can be applied in comparative analyses and provide either theoretical or practical lessons (or both) that explain why policy integration and coordination reforms vary across countries and policy sectors as well as why some of these reforms succeed in dealing with the problems they try to address while others failed.

The workshop will consist of sessions in which the authors present their papers, with a special attention to their approach, the results and the general contribution of the paper. Each paper will be discussed by a discussant and then with the audience. We will ask participants to serve as discussants of other participants’ contributions. The goal of the workshop is to publish a special issue in an international peer-reviewed journal that contributes to political science, public policy and public administration literature.

Confirmed participants and preliminary paper titles:

1.     Biesbroek, Robbert (robbert.biesbroek@wur.nl). Tracking national-level policy integration of climate change adaptation across the globe.

2.     Christensen, Tom (tom.christensen@stv.uio.no) and Per Lagreid (Per.Lagreid@uib.no). Coordination Quality in Central Government – The Case of Norway.

3.     Hustedt, Thurid (Thurid.Hustedt@fu-berlin.de). Comparing changing coordination: The cases of digitalization and refugee policies in German federal government

4.     Meyer, Iris (iris.meyer@unil.ch). Mechanisms of policy (dis)integration in French and German housing policy.

5.     Michel, Cynthia L. (cynthia.michel@cide.edu) and Guillermo M. Cejudo (guillermo.cejudo@cide.edu). Policy integration in Latin America: Responses to fragmentation in social policy.

6.     Peters, B. Guy (bgpeters@). Program Elements: Linking Policy Design and Policy Integration

7.     Tosun, Jale (jale.tosun@ipw.uni-heidelberg.de). Ministerial structure and horizontal policy integration in energy governance.

8.     Trein, Philipp (josefphilipp.trein@unil.ch), Martino Maggetti (martino.maggetti@unil.ch). Reconfiguration of the central state: a comparative empirical analysis.

9.     Fischer, Manuel (Manuel.Fischer@eawag.ch), Martino Maggetti (martino.maggetti@unil.ch) and Philipp Trein (josefphilipp.trein@unil.ch). How to analyze boundary shifts of policy sectors? Research design and methods for the analysis of policy integration and coordination

Very likely to participate (but paper not yet confirmed finally)

Koen Verhoest (koen.verhoest@uantwerpen.be)

References:

6, Perri. 2004. "Joined-Up Government in the Western World in Comparative Perspective: A Preliminary Literature Review and Exploration." Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 14 (1):103-38.

Bezes, Philippe. 2009. Réinventer l'État: les réformes de l'administration française (1962-2008). Paris: Presses universitaires de France.

Bouckaert, Geert, B. Guy Peters, and Koen Verhoest. 2010. The Coordination of Public Sector Organizations: Shifting Coalitions of Public Management. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.

Briassoulis, Helen. 2004. "Policy Integration for Complex Policy Problems: What, Why and How." In Greening of Policies: Interlinkages and Policy Integration. Berlin.

Candel, Jeroen JL. 2017. "Holy Grail or inflated expectations? The success and failure of integrated policy strategies." Policy Studies:1-34.

Christensen, Tom, and Per Laegreid. 2007. "The Whole-of-Government Approach to Public Sector Reform." Public Administration Review 67 (6):1059-66.

Dahlström, Carl, B Guy Peters, and Jon Pierre. 2011. Steering from the Centre: Strengthening Political Control in Western Democracies: University of Toronto Press.

Gilardi, Fabrizio. 2008. Delegation in the Regulatory State: Independent Regulatory Agencies in Western Europe. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar.

Hood, Christopher. 1991. "A Public Management for all Seasons?" Public Administration 69 (1):3-19.

Hooghe, Liesbet, and Gary Marks. 2016. "Community, Scale, and Regional Governance: A Postfunctionalist Theory of Governance, Vol. II." Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hooghe, Liesbet, Gary Marks, Besir Ceka, and Tobias Lenz. 2017. Measuring International Authority: A Postfunctionalist Theory of Governance. Vol. 3. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hooghe, Liesbet, Gary Marks, Arjan H. Schakel, Sandra Chapman-Osterkatz, Sara Niedzwiecki, and Sarah Shair-Rosenfield. 2016. Measuring Regional Authority. Volume I: A Postfunctionalist Theory of Governance. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Maggetti, Martino. 2007. "De Facto Independence after Delegation: A Fuzzy-set Analysis." Regulation & Governance 1 (4):271-94.

Peters, B Guy. 2001. The Future of Governing. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.

Peters, B. Guy. 2015. Pursuing Horizontal Management: The Politics of Public Sector Coordination. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas.

Tosun, Jale, and Achim Lang. 2017. "Policy Integration: Mapping the Different Concepts." Policy Studies forthcoming.

Trein, Philipp. 2017. "Coevolution of Policy Sectors: A Comparative Analysis of Healthcare and Public Health." Public Administration 95 (3):744-58.

Varone, Frédéric, Stéphane Nahrath, David Aubin, and Jean-David Gerber. 2013. "Functional Regulatory Spaces." Policy Sciences 46 (4):311-33.

Vince, Joanna. 2015. "Integrated Policy Approaches and Policy Failure: The Case of Australia’s Oceans Policy." Policy Sciences 48 (2):159-80.

During the last decades, researchers and policymakers emphasized the transfer of political authority from national governments to other levels, that is, upwards, downwards and sideward. During the same period, governments in advanced democracies also reformed their politico-administrative systems, namely by reinforcing the integration of policy sectors and by reforming administrative coordination with respect to pressing policy challenges. Researchers have approached this topic using different approaches and concepts, such as “joined-up government” or “whole-of-government” to focus on the policy side, and the “steering state” of “self-care of the state” to point to the public administration dimension of the problem. This research has produced a variety of valuable insights based on case study research, however, research comparing countries and policies has been scarce. Against this background, this workshop seeks to make a contribution to the literature in bridging the conceptual diversity in this literature through an explicit focus on comparative analysis of the coordination and integration between countries and policy fields.

Against this background, we invite papers that move this literature forward in making contributions such as the following: i.) comparative analyses of reforms that integrate and coordinate policies and/or administrative units across different countries and/or policy fields; ii.) papers that conceptualize and examine the conditions or mechanisms that explain such reforms across sectors and countries; iii.) comparative analyses that analyze failed or successful reforms of policy integration and coordination in dealing with the policy challenge at hand. In principle, papers can have a theoretical or an empirical focus but preferences will be given to papers that use original comparative empirical material. The overarching goal of the workshop is to better connect research on the policy and on the administrative dimension of coordination, one to another, and, respectively, both to the wider governance literature.

During the last decades, researchers and policymakers emphasized the transfer of political authority from national governments to other levels, that is, upwards, downwards and sideward. During the same period, governments in advanced democracies also reformed their politico-administrative systems, namely by reinforcing the integration of policy sectors and by reforming administrative coordination with respect to pressing policy challenges. Researchers have approached this topic using different approaches and concepts, such as “joined-up government” or “whole-of-government” to focus on the policy side, and the “steering state” of “self-care of the state” to point to the public administration dimension of the problem. This research has produced a variety of valuable insights based on case study research, however, research comparing countries and policies has been scarce. Against this background, this workshop seeks to make a contribution to the literature in bridging the conceptual diversity in this literature through an explicit focus on comparative analysis of the coordination and integration between countries and policy fields. Therefore, this workshop seeks contributions that explain reform patterns of coordination and integration of policies and administrative units across countries and policy fields and discuss theoretical explanations and mechanisms that explain reform patterns or the impact of reforms on policy outcomes.

Philipp Trein is a postdoctoral researcher (PhD, 2015) in political science at the IEPHI (Institute of political, historical, and international studies) of the University of Lausanne and a visiting scholar at the IES (Institute of European Studies) at UC Berkeley. His research interests cover comparative public policy (coordination and integration of policies, health policy, employment policy), comparative federalism and multilevel governance (including European Studies), as well as economic voting (Germany). His research appeared or is forthcoming in the following outlets: Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, European Journal of Political Research, German Politics, Journal of Public Policy, Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis: Research and Practice, Journal of Public Policy, Public Administration, Publius: the Journal of Federalism, and Regional and Federal Studies. His monograph Healthy or Sick? Coevolution of Health Care and Public Health in a Comparative Perspective will be published with Cambridge University Press.

Martino Maggetti is associate professor in political science at the Institute of Political, Historical and International Studies (IEPHI) of the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. His research interests mainly focus on public policy and regulatory governance. He is the main applicant of the research project When and why do governments integrate policy sectors? A comparative analysis of eleven countries and four policy areas, which is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF). He teaches on public policy, mixed methods, and the politics of regulation. His research articles have appeared in several top journals, including: The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Business & Society, European Journal of Political Research, European Political Science Review, International Review of Administrative Sciences, Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis, Journal of European Public Policy, Journal of Public Policy, Political Research Quarterly, Political Studies Review, Public Administration, Regulation & Governance, Swiss Political Science Review, and West European Politics. His latest book is Comparative Politics: Theoretical and Methodological Challenges (Edward Elgar 2015, co-edited with Dietmar Braun).

B. Guy Peters is Maurice Falk Professor of American Government at the University of Pittsburgh. He earned his PhD at Michigan State University in 1970 and has four honorary doctorates from European universities. He is founding President of the International Public Policy Association, and founding editor of Governance and the European Political Science Review. Guy Peters is associate editor of the Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis and also editor of a book series on public sector organizations for Palgrave/Macmillan.  He is author or editor of over 80 books, including most recently Pursuing Horizontal Management: The Politics of Policy Coordination, and Governance and Comparative Politics (with Jon Pierre).