Call for Paper: Integrated Policymaking as a Problem of Collaboration

Integrated Policymaking as a Problem of Collaboration

Collaborative governance and integrated policy approaches have become commonplace to combat ‘wicked problems’ (Bannink and Trommel 2019) in a variety of policy domains (Douglas et al. 2020). However, policy integration is notoriously hard to establish, implement and maintain (e.g. Van Duijn 2022).

Actors involved in the definition of integrated policies need to navigate among different understandings of problems and different normative orientations towards policy. The implementation of inter-organisational collaborative approaches requires overcoming boundaries between institutionalised perspectives and modes of organisation. The maintenance requires a context of action that supports shared action and outcomes.

However, a wicked problem is wicked, because different organisational actors see different problems. The research problem we aim to address is how shared perspectives emerge, or do not emerge, in a diverse actor constellation and how actors with diverging perspectives might engage in collaborative processes of definition, implementation and maintenance to combat wicked problems.

A shared policy approach needs to be defined, e.g. through relational leadership; implementation and maintenance need to be supported, e.g. through multi-layered management; on top of that, these horizontal and vertical integration challenges interact. The analysis we propose in this special issue helps unfold the interconnections between the actor constellation, consisting of the actor positions and preferences in policy definition, implementation and maintenance, on the one hand, and the envisioned collaboration on the other: how, in a world of separate policy definition, implementation and maintenance, might collaborative governance (at all these levels) support integrated policy?

List of topic areas

Article contributions should (1) discuss cases in the public sector; (2) analyze cases using a decentred approach. Contributions can focus on the following themes:

Bottom-up analysis of wicked problem policymaking and management in various policy domains;
and/or bottom-up analysis of cases of collaboration and integration in various policy domains.
Comparison in which a ‘collaborative’ and an ‘actor-centred’ analysis of the same case is compared, discussing what either approach reveals and obscures as well as the impact on the ways we understand integration.
Comparison of collaborative success-cases of integrated policy making to unsuccessful cases, discussing the differences in the actor positioning, policy process and context.
Cases of policy integration that are analysed in creative or novel ways that help increase our understanding of the dynamics involved with implementing and maintaining collaboration in the public sector.

Guest Editors

Duco Bannink, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands, [email protected]

Sarah van Duijn, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands, [email protected]

Justin Waring, University of Birmingham, United Kingdom, [email protected]

Submissions Information

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Author Guidelines

Authors should select (from the drop-down menu) the special issue title at the appropriate step in the submission process, i.e. in response to ““Please select the issue you are submitting to”.

Submitted articles must not have been previously published, nor should they be under consideration for publication anywhere else, while under review for this journal.