FRIEND OR FOE? INTER‐AGENCY COOPERATION, ORGANIZATIONAL REPUTATION, AND TURF
| Published date | 01 March 2016 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12160 |
| Date | 01 March 2016 |
| Author | E. MADALINA BUSUIOC |
doi : 10. 1111/p adm .12160
FRIEND OR FOE? INTER-AGENCY COOPERATION,
ORGANIZATIONAL REPUTATION, AND TURF
E. MADALINA BUSUIOC
This article aims to explain two contrasting cases of bureaucratic cooperation: the cooperation
practices of two similar European agencies – Europol and Frontex – with corresponding national-
level structures. To understand why cooperation has proceeded smoothly in one case (border
management), while triggering strong turf-protective tendencies in the other (law enforcement), the
article develops a theoretical approach to cooperation that is both ‘turf’ and reputation sensitive.
Drawing on a variety of documents and interview material, the article demonstrates that the diver-
gent outcomes are shaped to a large extent by the differentreputational impact of cooperation for the
national authorities concerned. In one case, cooperation depletes important reputational resources
of national authorities, threatening their ‘reputational uniqueness’ and triggering turf-protective
tendencies. In the other,vertical and horizontal cooperation efforts bring important gains to national
authorities’ ability to discharge their tasks successfully and, thus, to their reputation-building efforts.
Crucially however, they do so without threatening their ‘reputationaluniqueness’.
INTRODUCTION
In today’s interconnected world, complex policy problems – be they environmental issues,
serious crime, illegal immigration – increasingly span geographical borders and regula-
tory jurisdictions. Meaningful regulatory response is, therefore, necessarily of a grow-
ing trans-boundary nature; it entails the involvement of manifold bureaucratic entities,
bypassing hierarchical centre–periphery divides and cross-cutting traditional regulatory
jurisdictions. Crucial to this response, and therefore to the successful tackling of such com-
plex policy problems, is how bureaucratic cooperation plays out in practice.
Nowhere are such attempts at engendering trans-boundary coordination and coopera-
tion as institutionally visible as in the context of the European Union (EU) – the quintessen-
tial ‘regulatory state’ (Majone 1996), characterized by a multiplicity of regulatory actors,
operating and cooperating across different levels of governance. In the last three decades,
we have seen for instance, among others, the rise of a new breed of bureaucratic actors at
the EU level – European agencies, set up to address specic common problems through
improved trans-national cooperation among (fragments of) member states’ bureaucracies
(Gehring and Krapohl 2007; Dehousse 2008; Groenleer 2009; Special Issue of the Journal
of European Public Policy 2011; Busuioc et al. 2012; cf. Kelemen 2002; Kelemen and Tarrant
2011). These agencies, 35 to date, operate in a variety of regulatory areas – such as food
safety, chemicals, energy, aviation safety, and nancial supervision – and are themselves
heavily reliant on cooperation from national structures (both horizontally, amongst each
other as well as vertically, with the EU level) to function and full their mandates.
Bureaucratic or inter-agency cooperation, however, is not exactly easy to achieve. It is
one of those elusive ‘good things’: both desirable and necessary, yet hard to implement
(Bryson et al. 2006). The adoption of rules mandating cooperation is no guarantee that
the formal decree will be followed through. Examples of bureaucratic reluctance to coop-
erate and even full-blown ‘turf wars’ (Wilson 1989, pp. 185–88, 195) abound, be it that
the context is trans-national or a strictly national one. The magnitude of the problem is
E. Madalina Busuioc is in the Department of Politics, University of Exeter, UK.
Public Administration Vol.94, No. 1, 2016 (40–56)
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
INTER-AGENCY COOPERATION 41
only compounded in a trans-boundary context, however. With the involvement of mul-
tiple actors from different jurisdictions who, to complicate matters, are not accustomed
to working together, tensions, inconsistencies, and ‘turf wars’ are likely to be even more
prevalent.
The difculties and contradictions inherent in trans-national co-operation efforts are
poignantly illustrated by our two contrasting cases of cooperation: the cooperation prac-
tices of two similar European agencies – the European Union’s Law Enforcement Agency
(Europol) and the European Agency for the Management of Operational Cooperation
at the External Borders of the Member States of the European Union (Frontex) – with
corresponding national-level structures. Both EU agencies were set up to tackle specic
policy problems – serious crime of a trans-national nature and illegal migration, respec-
tively – by fostering operational cooperation among the EU member states in the area
of law enforcement and border management. The sensitivity of the elds in which both
agencies operate (i.e. in terms of national sovereignty) raises considerable potential for
tensions with coexisting national structures. Rather surprisingly, however, in practice
the two agencies – while very similar on the one hand and expected to have to face
comparable cooperation challenges – have had dissimilar cooperation experiences. As
we will see below, while Europol has encountered signicant cooperation difculties,
manifested in a strong reluctance by national forces to cooperate across a whole range
of key agency activities, Frontex, on the other hand, has beneted from cooperation and
support post-delegation from national authorities.
To explore and make sense of this puzzle, the article adopts a theoretical approach to
cooperation that is both ‘turf’ and reputation sensitive. Informed by insights from classic
literature on bureaucratic behaviour (Wilson 1989) and more recent, inuential work on
organizational reputation (Carpenter 2001, 2010; Carpenter and Krause 2012; Maor 2010),
it contends that turf-conscious bureaucratic actors cooperate subject to positive reputa-
tional calculations. Organizational reputation, and an understanding of how it is accrued
in various contexts, can be crucial, it is argued, to bureaucratic willingness to cooperate or
the lack thereof.
The topic of cooperation has received considerable attention from various strands of lit-
erature – particularly literature on collaborative governance, inter-organizational cooper-
ation, and collaborative public management (for comprehensive literature overviews and
efforts to systematize existing approaches, see, for instance, Bryson et al. 2006; Ansell and
Gash 2008; Emerson et al. 2012). While this literature identies a variety of factors that can
determine cooperation, such as leadership, incentives, (resource) inter-dependence, and
uncertainty, the role of organizational reputation(s) in conditioning cooperation remains
largely unexplored. In adopting a reputation-focused approach, the article does not aim to
play down the broader relevance of these other factors, as identied and well established in
existing literature, but rather to signal the key – yet neglected – role played by reputation.
The two cases analysed here indicate that reputation can be an important consideration in
public bodies’ commitment to cooperation or, on the contrary, in their resistance to such
endeavours.
The article is structured as follows: rst, the proposed theoretical approach to coop-
eration is laid out. This is followed by a section on methods, where case selection and
data sources are addressed. Next, the practices of cooperation of national structures with
the two EU agencies are examined in turn, in a comparative fashion, pointing to signi-
cant differences in our two cases. The following section attempts to explain the observed
Public Administration Vol.94, No. 1, 2016 (40–56)
© 2015 John Wiley& Sons Ltd.
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