COORDINATION

There is a large amount of coordination between line ministry public servants. This takes place both directly on the civil servant level and also formally, as the Ministry of Finance must approve any proposal with budgetary implications and the Ministry of Justice for legal implications. It is not uncommon for these ministries to impose changes in policy proposals. It is therefore safe to say that most policy proposals are effectively coordinated by civil servants.

Career civil servants are rarely involved in providing policy proposals related to legislation. In administrative terms, civil servants can be somewhat involved in developing policy proposals, though not without strict supervision by political appointees. Executive branch policy-making is often coordinated by ad hoc interagency committees when it comes to issues not central to the president’s agenda. Such committees are chaired by a political appointee in one of the participating agencies, not by a civil servant. The large number of political appointees in the U.S. executive branch is demonstrative of the limited role played by civil servants in this context.

There are various interdepartmental coordination mechanisms at the level of civil servants. Often coordination starts at lower levels and moves up for a final check at the level of undersecretaries. Some committees of undersecretaries shadow cabinet committees within the government.

An area that requires a lot of coordination is EU legislation. From the start of Denmark’s membership, coordination between the ministries has taken place. Currently there are more than 30 EU special committees within the administration dealing with specific EU policies. These special committees involve representatives from ministries and agencies, and often also from interest organizations, that are concerned with the legislation in question. The lead ministry will chair these special committees.
The top-level committee is the EU committee chaired by the Foreign Ministry. Ministries that have most EU cases are permanent members. Other ministries take part on an ad hoc basis. At the cabinet level it is the foreign minister who chairs the foreign policy committee, but when it comes to meetings in the European Council these meetings are prepared by a permanent undersecretary committee chaired by the undersecretary in the PMO.

As it comes to policy programs and similar inter-sectoral issues, coordination between civil servants of separate ministries is a matter of course. In specific matters coordination may even be dictated. For instance, statements from the Ministry of Finance must be obtained on matters under preparation in other ministries in case these matters carry economic and financial significance. On the whole, given the decision-making culture, civil servants of individual ministries are certainly expected to coordinate with other ministries. An unwritten code of behavior prescribes a harmonious and undisturbed mode of action, and it is therefore the task of a minister or a ministry to bring projects which are financially burdensome or sensitive from a party political point of view to a collective examination and testing.

Most policy proposals are coordinated by civil servants, leaving the cabinet to focus on strategic issues. There have been no notable changes in this area in the past two years.

The amount and effectiveness of policy proposal coordination varies a great deal depending on the policy field. However, there is clearly coordination in the preparation of cabinet papers and quite demanding processes specified in cabinet office circulars. That, beginning from 2009, new senior officials’ committees have been established to support cabinet committee chairs points to earlier weaknesses that need to be overcome with a new instrument for coordination.

Two instruments, the large and the small co-reporting procedures, are specifically designed to coordinate policy proposals between the ministries. These processes invite the ministries to take positions on political issues. The co-reporting procedure is largely a process of negative coordination, which highlights incompatibilities with other policies but does not systematically scrutinize the potential for synergy.

Line Ministry civil servants coordinate their policy proposals in a number of ways. One is through project teams that cut across departments and aim to enhance policy coordination – the so-called task forces. They operate to enhance “joined-up” government, an idea which has recently regained some attention, although the problem of the lack of coordination within Whitehall was identified as early as the 1970 White Paper on the reorganization of central government. Interaction between line ministries and the two overseeing departments (the Cabinet Office and Treasury) is a key part of the system, although a ministry can advance proposals a certain extent before they are opened up to wider influence.
The creation of departmental strategy units, different in size and shape though they are, has helped to make departments more aware of long-term perspectives. In addition, a central “Foresight Center,” led by the government’s chief scientific adviser and located in the Department of Business Innovation and Skills, is specifically tasked with coordination between departments, and uses small teams of individually picked civil servants to fulfill its role.

There is generally a high level of coordination between line ministry public servants. In most cases this must involve, at a minimum, the Department of Finance and the Treasury, since they are responsible for resourcing any new policy developments, and these must feed into the government’s spending and budget cycle. Where there are legal implications, there must be coordination with the Attorney-General’s Department. Departments least likely to coordinate their activities across the government portfolio are Defence and Foreign Affairs and Trade, since their activities have least implications across the other portfolios.
Coordination is especially effective when proposals are driven by the political leadership, but is less effective on policy matters initiated at the level of the minister or department, in part reflecting greater uncertainty among civil servants as to the support for the proposal from the political leadership.

Many policy proposals are coordinated by line ministries with other line ministries. However, due to issues of departmental mandates and authority, this process is generally not as effective as the central agency coordination process. On certain issues, a line department may be unwilling to recognize the role or expertise of other line departments, and hence may fail to consult and/or coordinate a policy proposal with these perceived competitors. Given that virtually all policy issues are now horizontal, line departments have very little ability to coordinate policy proposals. This, in turn, explains in part the growing strength of central agencies.

As with senior ministry officials, line ministry civil servants have not played a central role in core government decision-making, but – depending on the ministry – can be more or less involved in preparing cabinet meetings.

Senior officials and interministerial committees are important in the coordination of policy proposals.

Effective coordination is a challenge and a problem in the Central Government Office (CGO). Task forces of civil servants play an important role in the complex process of coordination. When issues cannot be settled on that level they are “lifted” to the political level. However, not even these arrangements automatically help to solve the coordination problem. One explanation might be that the PMO is not sufficiently active in a coordinating role; another explanation might be that coordination becomes problematic because it is often handled at the civil servant level and is not “lifted” to the political echelons of the system unless there is disagreement among civil servants from different ministries. Both explanations suggest that there is a leadership deficit in the CGO and that the coordination problem is first and foremost a manifestation of that problem. Besides the CGO, the civil servants of the Ministry of Finance play a crucial role in coordinating policy developments.

Coordination is achieved by ad hoc committees composed of civil servants from the various ministries. However, sometimes instead of cooperation or coordination, one ministry’s proposal can be blocked or opposed by another ministry’s staff. In such cases, political coordinating bodies or the cabinet itself deal directly with the issue, regardless of the type of government in power.

Senior ministry officials play an important role in preparing cabinet meetings. According to the 1969 law on the Icelandic state administration, no cooperation between ministries is presumed in cases when the ministers themselves are not involved. With new plans to merge and streamline ministries, a closer cooperation has been suggested (Skýrsla starfshóps forsætisráðuneytisins, 2010). The involvement of too many ministries and ministers has in some cases been found to be a barrier to progress in policy-making, a consequence of strong ministerial powers and independence. Today, coordination between line ministries does not take place on a regular basis, occurring essentially randomly in those instances when it does take place. The report of the parliament’s Special Investigation Commission (SIC) stressed the need for change in these areas, as have other reports, but as of the time of writing, such recommendations had not yet been implemented.

Line ministry civil servants on mid-management levels do not ordinarily participate in interdepartmental administrative coordination; policy design and approval follow the usual hierarchical lines. However, policy projects are increasingly defined as demanding inter-departmental coordination. Although there are examples of well-functioning interdepartmental working groups (Korsten et al., 2010), most of the time such cooperation is difficult and time-consuming. This is probably due to the two-pronged strategy by departmental top-level officers: on the one hand, a defensive, risk-averse strategy in their contacts with (deputy) ministers, and particularly in the administrative “front gates” (see also Senior Ministry Officials); on the other, an intra-departmentally oriented strategy of professionalization and contract management. Thus, mid-management policy officers (i.e., heads of divisions and sub-divisions) have to prepare policy proposals while taking into account a political landscape to which they are have no direct relation and which is filtered by the media and reports from their superiors. Unsurprisingly, (deputy) ministers complain about the political sensitivity of many line ministry officials; and many line ministry officials complain about the lack of expertise among their own administrative superiors and the political leadership with respect to policy content and implementation.

Line ministry civil servants also play a significant role in policy coordination. Inter-ministerial coordination can take the form of working groups consisting of civil servants from different ministries. It is often complicated by hierarchical structures within the ministries, a culture of departmentalism, and differences in the political affiliation of ministries.

Mexico has no general career civil servants, or clear division in governmental terms between politicians and administrators. Many of the senior civil servants are presidential appointees, although civil servants’ level of meritocratic autonomy varies among ministries. For example, the foreign ministry has its own civil servant career structure. The degree of interministerial coordination has been mostly adequate under the current government, with the exception of activity associated with the war on drugs, in which interministerial coordination has not been as effective as needed.

There is no formal coordination procedure for drafting bills. Nonetheless, some informal coordination exists, particularly between ministries controlled by the same party. In addition, the Chancellery can help coordinate policy.

Bills are generally prepared by specialized ministerial legislative units in cooperation with departmental units responsible for the content of the proposed legislation. As part of the interministerial coordination process, some coordination among line-ministry civil servants takes place. However, there are no clear rules on coordination, and within ministries strong hierarchies and a departmentalist culture prevail.

Coordination is a matter for the Prime Minister’s or the President’s Offices. Line ministry civil servants have to take into account the draft proposals from other ministries but coordination is not the main concern in most cases. Defense of line ministries’ prerogatives is often the main issue. Fights and conflicts are frequent (even if most of the time they do not come to the fore). In the most difficult cases (when ministers back up strongly the positions of their respective civil servants), the prime minister has to step in and settle the matter.

Ex ante coordination between the line ministries’ leading civil servants has generally not been strong, whether in the previous or current government. In addition, an entrenched political practice ensures that no ministry makes any proposal which might be postponed or blocked by other ministries. Proposals are often heatedly discussed in public by party politicians, ministers or the state’s minister-presidents before any interministerial coordination takes place. The federal Ministry of Finance must be involved when budgetary resources are concerned, while complicated legal or constitutional issues necessitate the involvement of the federal Ministry of Justice. But generally, every ministry in charge is fully politically responsible for its own proposed bills.

When the DPJ and its coalition partners took over government responsibility in 2009, a number of high-profile measures were put in place aimed at reducing the influence of civil servants in policy-making. One measure was to abolish the administrative vice-ministers meeting. Another was that political appointees rather than senior civil servants are now required to speak on behalf of their ministries, particularly in the course of official functions such as reports to the Diet or press conferences; when this happens, they are not to read from pre-formulated scripts but to speak freely about the political issues involved. It is an open question whether the new government will be successful in reducing the strength of the civil service. Because politicians will have to rely on the expertise and loyalty of civil servants in the future, the path that the DPJ-led government is taking is a very delicate one.

Line ministries are required to coordinate with other ministries at early stages of the legislative process. Coordination by civil servants is complicated by a strong departmentalist culture. Under the Fico government, the “outsourcing” of law-making to think tanks that had been characteristic of the Dzurinda government, lost relevance. At the same time, the politicization of ministries limited the scope for bureaucratic coordination “from the bottom.”

Most day-to-day government business is handled by senior ministry officials, who prepare most items for cabinet meetings in an effective way. However, as mentioned above, the cabinet plays a relatively small role in the political process, as all important issues are discussed bilaterally between the Blue House and the relevant ministry.

Although departmental fragmentation is high in Spain, or perhaps precisely because of this, there is no tradition of interministerial administrative coordination. To be sure, the role of high-ranking civil servants (normally the so-called subdirectores generales) is crucial in the preparation of policy proposals within every line ministry, but their subsequent involvement in horizontal coordination with other ministries is very limited. In fact, and as a consequence of the difficulties of interministerial coordination, every ministry tends to act within its area of competence or jurisdiction, avoiding proposals which may involve other ministries. Although many administrative committees formally exist, in practice these committees do not coordinate the drafting of policy proposals or decision-making between different ministries. As administrative committees do not tend to work efficiently, they have fallen by the wayside and now usually simply facilitate the exchange of information or try to settle jurisdictional conflicts.

Public administration in Belgium has less influence on policy steering than in most other developed countries. When appointed, each minister hires a team of fully devoted close collaborators who then shape strategic decisions together with their minister and draft projects submitted to the government. Ministry civil servants are much less involved in this process than the ministers’ direct advisors. The civil servants’ responsibility materializes in later stages, for example, in the technical evaluation of some proposals submitted to the government, in the implementation of decisions made by the government or for ex post monitoring tasks.

Some degree of consultation and coordination with regard to policy proposals, with special attention devoted to the legal aspects of bills, is conducted by the individual ministries’ civil servants (typically the heads of the legislative offices of each ministry). However, the effectiveness of this process is limited by the strong independence of the various ministerial bureaucracies. The consequence of this limited coordination is that conflicts between ministries in areas of overlapping competencies are frequent. Typical examples are conflicts between “spending ministries” (such as the ministries of Education or Industry) and the Treasury, which is undoubtedly the strongest gatekeeper.

Coordination by line ministry civil servants takes places, but is limited. The legal coordination requirements at the preparatory stage of legislation are weak, and there is still a strong culture of departmentalism.

Line ministries’ higher civil servants are not normally involved in either the formulation or the coordination of policy proposals. Most policy preparation is done by political appointees, typically pro-government academics, experts and governing party cadres who form the minister’s entourage. These appointees staff a unit at the peak of each ministry’s hierarchy which is the functional equivalent of the French “cabinet ministerial,” called in Greece the “political bureau of the minister.”
Successive governments have found cross-departmental coordination to be very difficult for political, bureaucratic and quality of resource reasons. Ministries tend to be isolated fiefdoms, with distinct political interests; and the amount of available information by which policy can be merged and coordinated can be woefully weak.
Thus, the role of higher civil servants is very limited. Only a few capable civil servants are invited or are even capable of raising legal issues, or of pointing to potential implementation difficulties during the drafting and coordinating stages of policy creation. This administrative capacity is the result of the longstanding practice, under many successive governments, of hiring unskilled employees selected on the basis of patronage, party political or personal criteria, and subsequently promoting them to the upper echelons of the civil service bureaucracy.
The Papandreou government, elected in September 2009, has initiated moves to address these problems of coordination and control.

There are no effective structures of horizontal administrative coordination between ministries. The lack of clearly established channels of communication is compensated for through personal contacts or ministerial instructions. While this process generally worked effectively in the 2005 – 2009 period, it has come under strain in the new Sócrates administration, as the government’s minority in parliament and pressures to control public expenditure have generated additional demands for interministerial coordination.