Abstract
This chapter surveys the imperatives for enhanced flexibility in government, including the rise of nonroutine problems and the misalignment of public organizational structures and capabilities. It explores how different and expanding forms of policy complexity and environmental turbulence are challenging public officials to become more collaborative, agile, and resilient in the way they respond to nonroutine problems. The chapter surveys the nature of nonroutine problems and catalogues the most common forms of nonroutine responses deployed by public organizations.
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Notes
- 1.
‘Collaboration’ is perhaps the most common term to describe working across organizational and sectoral boundaries. The focus here on collaboration is intended to exemplify arrangements where flexibility is considered important to the effectiveness of public policy design and service delivery outcomes. For a survey of the different types see Alford and O’Flynn (2012: 113–124).
- 2.
It should not go unnoticed that the advancement and diffusion of digital technologies, as one of the drivers of much contemporary social and economic disruption, may also create more scope for decision-makers to achieve a better balance between routine and nonroutine responses and structures. One example is the way that social media can be deployed to mobilize government and civil society responses to natural disaster and terrorism emergencies.
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Di Francesco, M., Alford, J. (2016). Nonroutine Problems and Flexibility. In: Balancing Control and Flexibility in Public Budgeting. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-0341-7_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-0341-7_2
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