The nine trends reshaping government in 2023

The change is happening at all levels of government. In both thought and practice, visible both inside and outside public buildings: Walls are coming down. The silos inside governments and between government agencies and between government and the private sector—all of these boundaries are increasingly being dissolved in the service of results.

This year’s Government Trends report highlights a vital shift with broad impact. In an age of discontinuity,¹ governments are moving from hierarchies to networks to enable intragovernment collaboration to achieve intended outcomes. Silos are being eliminated in areas such as data, funding, and workforce to pool resources and capabilities. In an age of vexing challenges, public officials, business leaders, and nonprofits are nurturing collaborative public-private ecosystems to take advantage of shared knowledge and unique strengths to drive solutions.

We see six ongoing paradigm shifts—discontinuities—that are driving this change:

1. Accelerated technology. Governments are using technologies such as cloud computing, data analytics, and AI tobuild connections between people, systems, and different government agencies.
2. Convergence of physical and digital realms. Technologies such as Internet of Things (IoT) and digital twins enable the convergence of physical and digital realities at a rapid pace, allowing government at all levels to make informed decisions, anticipate problems, and gain reliable insights into the future.
3. Decline of “the theory of the firm” and rise of “the theory of the ecosystem.” Most individual organizations increasingly see themselves as part of the larger community. Why labor in isolation when you can achieve win-win results through collaboration? Datafication, digitization, and connectivity are dissolving traditional boundaries.
4. Blurring of the lines between public and private. While still focused on profits, businesses are also embracing social and environmental responsibilities, with many adopting purpose-driven business models that can help deliver public solutions.
5. Rise of networked power. Hierarchical and centralized power structures are giving way to more networked, decentralized, and shared models of authority.
6. From public to “network” trust. Public trust in government is near historic lows.² Complex problems often involve numerous players, and citizens are increasingly looking to businesses and nonprofits to take action on cross-cutting societal challenges. This shift is reframing the paradigm away from “government should solve X” to public leaders guiding ecosystem-driven solutions that tap into a broad network of solution providers.

These six discontinuities are reframing how governments approach their role in delivering public value. The result: Walls are coming down which will enable governments to be more effective and connected to those across and outside of government.

A convergence of public and private action

The traditional mechanisms of government—siloed and hierarchical—are ill-equipped to handle our current age of discontinuity. Increasingly, the real work of public policy happens within networks among levels of government, between sectors, and across global boundaries.

Consider COVID-19. It would be nearly impossible to diagram all the players involved in the global battle against the pandemic—not because the players are unknown, but because they are so numerous, woven together in webs of enormous complexity. An expansive array of national government agencies, state and local governments, private companies, and nonprofits contributed, working on key tasks such as vaccine development and distribution.³ Making the response effective required—still requires—keeping all the players moving in the same direction.

The pandemic response won’t be the last time the world needs government to convene such a whole-of-society response. From climate change to cybersecurity, challenges are becoming more complex, affecting private and public sector alike, not respecting the boundaries of institutions that have been created to address them.⁴

While many people might claim to put little faith in government, they implicitly look to government to tackle our biggest problems. This year’s Government Trends report illustrates that the solutions are rarely the public sector’s sole province: Getting the job done requires multiple actors collaborating across sectors. Achieving public policy goals increasingly depends on coordinated effort by government and the private sector—working in concert with academia, social enterprises and nonprofits.

Businesses’ rising sense of purpose and desire to contribute meaningfully to society offers governments an important new partner in tackling society’s most pressing issues.⁵ Purpose-driven enterprises, both for-profit and nonprofit, can amplify public-sector resources. They also help government keep pace with technological innovation. Links with universities and nonprofits can provide both theoretical and front-line understanding of challenging problems. Collaboration with the private sector can even enhance public trust in government, since global surveys suggest that business is now society’s most trusted institution.⁶

Whole-of-government/whole-of-society approaches are key to tackling tough challenges

Government leaders increasingly recognize that navigating a world of discontinuity necessitates coming together. The massive scale and complexity of big challenges, such as climate change, cybercrime,⁷ and, pandemics, are beyond any single agency’s ability to address. One major trend this year is the emphasis on collaboration between different agencies of government—a whole-of-government approach—in dealing with vexing problems.

Governments around the world are experimenting with cross-agency approaches to delivering services. Singapore, for example, has used shared funding mechanisms to encourage interagency collaboration, with the prime minister’s office, coordinating whole-of-government projects supported by a team of senior officials from multiple agencies.⁸

While pooling capabilities can help agencies enhance service delivery, working at the cutting-edge also requires proactive collaboration with commercial entities. In order to establish a reliable supply of semiconductors both the EU and the US have passed legislation, most notably the €43 billion EU Chips Act and US$52 billion CHIPS Act.⁹ Instead of creating a new agency to build chip-making facilities, these laws direct multiple agencies to achieve this goal by working with commercial chip manufacturers, encouraging business entities to increase semiconductor manufacturing capacity within certain regions.

Dissolving boundaries—the unifying theme of the 2023 Government Trends report

Our 2023 trends report identified nine distinct trends related to the overall trend of cross-boundary collaboration. The report distills extensive research on government and explores what’s happening in the trenches. This year’s report also includes several “My Take” sections from public officials who are helping to pioneer these innovative trends.

The first Government Trends report was published in 2019. Four years is a relatively short period, and the themes covered in the first four reports remain relevant today. Figure 1 looks at all of the trends covered in the first four reports, how they are related, and how they have evolved. Some issues, such as digital government, have been a constant theme throughout the years. Other issues, such as embedding resilience, have rapidly emerged as governments increasingly grapple with disruptive shocks.