Debate: Against collaboration

Abstract

This article argues that collaboration should not be a policy goal of government. Collaboration does not solve the problem of fragmented services. Focusing on collaboration wastes money, fosters compliance and creates a new layer of bureaucracy. Meanwhile, the true cause of fragmented services goes unaddressed. \n \nCollaboration has been a policy goal of the UK government since the election of Labour in 1997. It has become a central feature of policy initiatives, cross-agency funding and performance-reporting regimes. \n \nAs Huxham (Citation1996) notes, there is little consensus about what the term ‘collaboration’ means, either in theory or in practice. I use the term here to describe inter-organizational relationships in public services funded or mandated by central government. I make eight charges against government-funded collaboration.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 13 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.