Introduction¹

There has been an explosion of academic and professional literature on horizontal management and whole-of-government perspectives on public sector governance.² It reflects growing awareness of the complexity of policy and management problems, the many kinds of expertise and governance tools that need to be brought to bear on them, the demands of citizen and other groups for coordinated policy development and service delivery, the interest in discerning overall outcomes of government interventions, and recognition of the extent to which public servants at all levels work across traditional boundaries to meet these demands.³ The literature has probed many facets of horizontal governance, including, best practices and training for horizontal management,⁴ ways to inculcate cultures in public service institutions more conducive to working across the traditional boundaries of departments and governments,⁵ more sophisticated approaches to assessing performance and monitoring results,⁶ and developing frameworks and experimenting with different institutional arrangements for delivering service across conventional boundaries.⁷

The demands for whole-of-government perspectives and horizontal coordination will continue to multiply, and in a parliamentary governance regime with strong central institutions, this creates challenges for the centre: the prime minister, cabinet, the Privy Council Office, and other central agencies. We expect “the centre” to be on top of all issues, despite considerable concern about the reach of the prime minister and the PMO.⁸ If we agree that (1) the number of issues with horizontal attributes will continue to increase, and (2) the capacity of the centre is limited, then there is (3) an acute need to identify strategic approaches to managing horizontal governance.⁹

This paper attempts to further thinking about strategic dimensions of horizontal governance at the system level. The points of departure are two recently published reports, Connecting Government from the Management Advisory Committee of the Australian Public Service and The Horizontal Challenge from the Canada School of Public Service. Each study identifies ways to improve the management of specific horizontal initiatives, and each broaches the matter of how the system might handle them in aggregate on a rolling basis. This paper suggests that a crucial consideration concerns how the centre allocates its attention and whether and how it builds distinct capacity to ensure horizontal initiatives are nurtured, designed, navigated for decision, implemented, and assessed. At the system level, this raises the questions of whether and how the centre manages a veritable ecology of capacities on a rolling basis, and whether there is a trade-off between the reputedly softer change associated with horizontal coordination and the harder change of bureaucratic reorganization. The paper concludes with four proposals to more systematically manage horizontal issues at the centre.

¹  This paper was initially stimulated by an invitation to speak at a luncheon hosted by the National Institute of Governance in Canberra on 22 April 2004 to mark the release of Connecting Government: Whole of Government Responses to Australia’s Priority Challenges (Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia, 2004), the fourth report of the Management Advisory Committee. See Evert Lindquist, “Connecting Government: Perspectives From Canada”, Canberra Bulletin of Public Administration, No. 112 (June 2004), pp.15-23. It was also informed by discussions of the workshop sessions in 2003 of the Governance Research Program of the Canada School of Public Service pertaining to early drafts of what became Herman Bakvis and Luc Juillet, The Horizontal Challenge: Line Departments, Central Agencies and Leadership (Ottawa: Canada School of Public Service 2004); and Evert Lindquist, “Culture, Control or Capacity: Meeting Contemporary Challenges in Horizontal Management” in Meredith Edwards and John Langford (eds.), New Players, Partners and Processes: A Public Sector Without Boundaries? (Canberra and Victoria: National Institute of Governance, University of Canberra, and Centre for Public Sector Studies, University of Victoria, 2002).

²  For a good review, see “Appendix 3 – Issues and Themes in Recent Literature on Whole of Government Approaches” in Connecting Government, op. cit., pp. 223-231.

³  It has been widely acknowledged that prime ministerial decisions on structuring decision-making and the machinery of government – including ministerial portfolios, cabinet committees, central agencies, and regional representation and delivery systems – have always grappled with horizontal challenges.

⁴  See CCMD Roundtable on the Management of Horizontal Initiatives, Moving From The Heroic to the Everyday: Lessons Learned From Leading Horizontal Projects (Ottawa: Canadian Centre for Management Development, 2001), CCMD Roundtable on Horizontal Mechanisms, Using Horizontal Tools To Work Across Boundaries: Lessons Learned and Signposts for Success (Ottawa: Canadian Centre for Management Development, 2002); Lindquist, “Culture, Control or Capacity”, op. cit., and Bakvis and Juillet, The Horizontal Challenge, op. cit.

⁵  See Canada, Report of the Task Force on the Management of Horizontal Policy Initiatives (Ottawa: Privy Council Office and Canadian Centre for Management Development, 1996); and Chapter 2 on “Structures and Processes” in Connecting Government, op. cit.

⁶  Auditor General of Canada, “Managing Departments for Results and Managing Horizontal Issues for Results”, Chapter 20 in Report of the Auditor General of Canada to the House of Commons, Volume 3, December 2000 (Ottawa: Minister of Public Works and Government Services Canada, 2000).

⁷  Robin Ford and David Zussman (eds.), Alternative Service Delivery: Sharing Governance in Canada (Toronto: KPMG Centre for Government Foundation and Institute of Public Administration of Canada, 1997); and Edwards and Langford (eds.), New Players, Partners and Processes: A Public Sector Without Boundaries?, op. cit.

⁸  Donald Savoie, Governing From the Centre: The Concentration of Power in Canadian Politics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999).

⁹  These propositions, among others, were outlined in Lindquist, “Culture, Control or Capacity”, op. cit., pp. 158-59.