Determined to succeed: Can goal commitment sustain interagency collaboration?
| Author | Rodney James Scott,Ross Boyd |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0952076720905002 |
| Published date | 01 January 2023 |
| Date | 01 January 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Determined to succeed:
Can goal commitment
sustain interagency
collaboration?
Rodney James Scott
University of New South Wales, Canberra, Australia
Ross Boyd
State Services Commission of New Zealand, Wellington,
New Zealand
Abstract
Governments have struggled with addressing problems that cross agency boundaries.
Since 2012, the New Zealand Government has achieved significant success by holding
groups of agencies collectively responsible for achieving intermediate outcome targets
(the ‘Results Programme’). The Results Programme has been described as the most
important change in how public services are delivered in New Zealand in 20 years. This
article uses a mixed methods approach to triangulate 10 features of the Results
Programme that appear to contribute to its success. Collaboration literature typically
focuses on reducing barriers, often expressed in terms of transaction costs; in contrast,
the successes of the Results Programme are explained here as methods for engineering
a sense of joint goal commitment, that provides the sustained impetus to succeed
despite the barriers encountered.
Keywords
Collaboration, goal commitment, mixed methods, New Zealand
Corresponding author:
Rodney James Scott, University of New South Wales, Canberra, Australian Capital Territory 2612, Australia.
Email: rodney.scott@unsw.edu.au
Public Policy and Administration
!The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0952076720905002
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2023, Vol. 38(1) 3–33
4 Public Policy and Administration 38(1)
Introduction
Supporting interagency collaboration is a major area of interest for governance
literature and practice (Carey and Crammond, 2015). Regardless of how govern-
ment is divided, some problems will inevitably span the boundaries between agen-
cies (Scott and Boyd, 2016). Addressing such problems has been described as both
the ‘holy grail’ (Peters, 1998) and the ‘philosophers stone’ (Jennings and Krane,
1994) of public administration. The barriers to interagency collaboration are gen-
erally believed to be high (Altshuler, 2003; Glendinning, 2003; Hudson et al.,
1999), and these barriers are frequently expressed in terms of transaction costs
(Scott and Bardach, 2019; Thomson and Perry, 2006, Warner and Hefetz, 2008).
Efforts to improve interagency collaboration have focussed on reducing transac-
tion costs to make collaborative work easier and to progress more quickly – how to
‘lower the barriers’ to collaboration (Edmondson and Roloff, 2009). This article
takes a different approach, and asks whether goal commitment might be used to
clear those barriers, or else to smash through them.
From 2012 until 2017, the New Zealand government operated an interagency
collaboration programme called the Better Public Services Results Programme (the
‘Results Programme’). The Results Programme combined target setting, public
reporting, shared responsibility, and various collaborative governance and man-
agement practices. It achieved process success, in that it was held up by public
servants as an example of successful collaborative behaviours (Scott and Boyd,
2017). More importantly, it achieved programmatic success (Marsh and
McConnell, 2010), in that the Results Programme improved outcomes in all
10 problems to which it was applied (State Services Commission, 2017).
This article considers why the Results Programme was successful, when other
interagency collaboration programmes in New Zealand had often failed (Scott and
Boyd, 2016). This article uses a mixed methods analysis to triangulate findings
from four sources. The analysis identifies features that we interpret as contributing
to the success of the Results Programme. These features seem to contribute to
a shared sense of commitment felt by participating agencies to achieving the
desired goal.
This article includes five parts following this introduction. First, there is a
description of the New Zealand context, the Results Programme, and why this
should be of scholarly interest. Second, the literature on interagency collaboration
and goal commitment are reviewed and summarised. Thirdly, the methodology is
described. Fourth, findings are presented. Finally, there is a discussion of how
these findings contribute to goal commitment.
The New Zealand context
New Zealand is a parliamentary democracy modelled after the Westminster style
of government, with the public sector divided into a large number of single-
purpose agencies. Ministers enjoy a high level of autonomy over policy within
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