Regulating Collaborative Government: Towards Joined-Up Government?

Abstract

This article examines the role of regulatory agencies in the development of joined-up government. It argues that they have the potential to both control and influence those agencies they regulate, and consequently constitute potentially significant catalysts for joined-up government. However, there are dangers that rivalry between regulatory agencies (and their different sponsors) and non-collaborative regulatory regimes (including game-playing and regulatory capture) may frustrate such moves towards joined-up government. It also argues that joined-up government requires joined-up regulation, otherwise so-called “wicked problems” that spread across the joins of government are likely to remain unsolved, or at best partially solved. Moves towards joined-up government, including joined-up regulation, are likely to be hindered by the way in which the state is functionally organised and the entrenched interests of politicians, bureaucrats and professionals that have sustained such an organisational and functional carve-up of the state. Consequently progress towards joined-up government, if the past is anything to go by, is likely to be slow and possibly more aspirational than real.