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Joined-Up Government for Welfare Administration Reform in Norway

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Abstract

One of the largest public sector reforms in Norway is the welfare administrative reform of 2005. The aims are to get passive beneficiaries back into work and to make the administration more user-friendly, holistic and efficient. The aims are to be achieved by increasing the administration’s capacity to address “wicked issues” by cutting across existing policy fields and administrative levels. This joined-up-government approach 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 article shows that increasing the capacity of government to cut across existing policy fields and handle transboundary wicked issues are still struggling to be implemented. Cooperation between sectors is however easier to achieve than cooperation between levels. The joined-up-government-approach also tends to make accountability relations more ambiguous.

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Notes

  1. For more information about the evaluation program see: http://rokkan.uni.no/nav/

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Acknowledgments

This paper is part of the Evaluation Program of the NAV Reform and the research paper “Reforming the Welfare State. Democracy, Accountability and Management”, funded by the Norwegian Research Council and managed by Stein Rokkan Centre for Social Studies. The research leading to these results has also received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme under grant agreement No. 266887 (Project COCOPS), Socioeconomic Sciences & Humanities. The Norwegian part of this project is managed by the Department of Administration and Organization Theory, University of Bergen.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Political Science, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

    Tom Christensen

  2. Department of Administration and Organization Theory, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway

    Anne Lise Fimreite & Per Lægreid

  3. Stein Rokkan Centre for Social Studies, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway

    Tom Christensen, Anne Lise Fimreite & Per Lægreid

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  1. Tom Christensen
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  2. Anne Lise Fimreite
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Correspondence to Per Lægreid.

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Christensen, T., Fimreite, A.L. & Lægreid, P. Joined-Up Government for Welfare Administration Reform in Norway. Public Organiz Rev 14, 439–456 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11115-013-0237-8

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