Joined-up-government: Reform challenges, experiences and accountability relations

The merger of the employment and national insurance administrations and the collaboration between this new administration and local social services is one of the largest public-sector reforms ever to take place in Norway. The aims of the reform are to get passive beneficiaries back into work and activity and to make the administration more user-friendly, holistic and efficient. These aims are to be achieved by increasing the administration’s capacity to address so called «wicked issues» by cutting across existing policy fields and territorial levels. The joined-up-government approach of this reform poses three main challenges: 1) to get a merged central government agency to work, 2) to establish constructive cooperation between the central and local authorities and 3) to coordinate front-line services with user-oriented employment and welfare offices. The paper discusses the experience gained from these three challenges five years into the reform process. The reform can hardly be proclaimed a success given its aims. The idea of increasing the capacity of government to cut across existing policy fields and handle trans boundary wicked issues is still struggling to be implemented. Cooperation between sectors seems to be easier to achieve than cooperation between levels. Experience has also revealed that the joined-up-government-approach of the reform tends to make accountability relations more blurred and ambiguous