Linked-up government

Trend in action

The trend, then, is toward coordinating, collaborating, and linking up government through joint efforts across multiple levels of government, missions, and programs. In the last few years, we’ve seen a plethora of such efforts around the world.

Organizing for cross-agency coordination

Thirty US states have established “Children’s Cabinets,” interagency partnerships intended to support child and family development—interests that were often addressed by a wide range of agencies delivering services in piecemeal fashion, especially when it came to low-income brackets.²

Maryland’s Children’s Cabinet, a collaboration between the state’s departments of health, human services, juvenile services, education and management, and budget, has worked with the Governor’s Office for Children to increase child immunization rates and reduce infant mortality and child maltreatment.³ It also publishes periodic well-being scorecards to track its progress.⁴ Similarly, Virginia’s Children’s Cabinet assembled state and local agencies and community stakeholders to improve outcomes for attendance, suspension rates, nutrition, and school accreditation in priority communities.⁵

Similar efforts can be observed at the US federal level. In 2011, Congress directed the Office of Management and Budget to develop cross-agency initiatives to “improve performance and management across the federal government.”⁶ One cross-agency priority (CAP) goal required an increase in federal facilities’ electricity consumption from renewable sources to 30% by 2025.⁷ By the end of fiscal 2015, direct greenhouse gas emissions by federal facilities had declined 17.6% from the fiscal 2008 baseline.⁸

Another CAP goal resulted in reducing security clearance backlogs from 725,000 cases in April 2018 to 200,000 in 2020.⁹ Another call for modernization of the permit process led to the creation of an online dashboard for agencies, project developers, and the public, which tracks environmental reviews and authorizations for large or complex infrastructure projects.¹⁰

The United Kingdom established theBetter Care Fund (BCF) in 2015, which is shared among the National Health Service, two other health and social care departments, and the Local Government Association to deliver integrated health and social care. Another interagency fund, the Shared Outcomes Fund, received £400 million in funding to address issues such as recidivism, violence, disinformation, drug enforcement, and refugee transitions.¹¹

Singapore formalized cross-agency coordination on security issues back in the 1970s; in 2004, it broadened this effort by organizing the Homefront Crisis Executive Group (HCEG) to spearhead a whole-of-government approach to crisis management.¹² During the pandemic, the country created by the Multi-Ministry Task Force (MTF) supported by the HCEG to manage its response to the situation. The MTF activated immigration and border authorities almost immediately, supported by civil defense officers.¹³ Backed by leaders across government, it aimed to build public trust through daily media briefings and accurate reporting of COVID-19’s spread. 

Integrating services to meet constituent needs

Integrated service delivery allows constituents to access multiple, coordinated services based on their needs. It breaks down silos, improves information-sharing, and reduces duplication to deliver better outcomes for recipients, families, and communities. For instance, an agency delivering unemployment insurance can work with workforce development boards to see if an individual needs work training. Similarly, an unemployment insurance agency can share information with other social care agencies to determine whether the individual qualifies for cash assistance, food programs, or public housing. 

In 2017, to combat increasingly disparate health outcomes in different regions in the country and rising obesity nationwide, the UK National Health Service (NHS) created integrated care systems, a new form of partnership among administrative organizations, health care providers, government agencies, and other local partners, intended to integrate all aspects of client care.¹⁴ These systems assemble a broad range of stakeholders into a body that operates on three principles: coproduction, the idea that all members of the collaborative are equal partners and no one partner “owns” the program’s output; personalized care that involves individuals in their own health care choices; and incentive contracts for service providers focused on achieving improved health outcomes.¹⁵

Similar approaches are underway in the United States. Maryland’s Department of Human Services has led an effort to create a cloud-based hub designed to integrate health and human services.¹⁶ This Total Human-Services Integrated Network (MD THINK) helps agencies design more effective programs by offering both a comprehensive view of citizen needs and secure access to master data management. MD THINK also aims to reduce overall operating costs by eliminating redundancy.¹⁷

The Philippines, in turn, is integrating its mental health services.¹⁸ The nation’s Department of Health has joined with the Education Department to add emotional resiliency into its life-skills curriculum for school students, and with the Department of Labor and Employment to implement workplace-based mental health interventions.¹⁹

Tackling “wicked” problems

The scope, complexity, and seeming intractability of many pressing societal issues require coordinated approaches. Intractable, open-ended, “wicked” problems—a term coined in 1973 by design theorists Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber—demand holistic thinking and cross-agency coordination.²⁰

The homeless population is particularly vulnerable to the COVID-19 pandemic. In response, UK local authorities, health agencies, and nonprofits launched a program called “Everyone In” to provide every UK resident with an opportunity to self-isolate during the pandemic. The program helped move 37,000 vulnerable people to hotels, B&Bs, and other temporary accommodations; leaders set up an interagency task force of local authorities and partners to help them stay off the streets.²¹

In 2015, Ethiopia set itself the bold goal of ending childhood malnutrition by 2030. This multisector initiative aims to increase investments in nutrition infrastructure and empower communities to find innovative solutions. Three pillars underpin the initiative:

• Community labs, a multisector group, assemble health care workers, school principals, religious leaders, and other stakeholders to create and test innovative solutions.²²
• Program delivery units at the federal and regional level then provide technical leadership, facilitate multisector coordination, and track performance management and resource mobilization. 
• The Unified Nutrition Information System for Ethiopia tracks nutritional data, visualizes progress, tracks financial allocations, and maps stakeholder capacity.²³

Despite the nation’s ongoing political and social challenges, the program has contributed to a steady reduction in child malnutrition.²⁴

Linked-up government is back in the limelight two decades after the Blair government envisioned “joining up.” The challenge now is to sustain the momentum gained during the pandemic and avoid slipping back to a siloed mindset that can hinder innovation and agility.