Original scientific paper
Problem of Coordination in Public Administration: Back to Hierarchy?
Petra Đurman
; Faculty of Law, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia
Anamarija Musa
; Faculty of Law, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
Coordination in public administration is one of the most important practical problems of public management, making it a very prominent issue for research. In the contemporary world, demands for coordination have increased, primarily due to the accumulative outcomes of reforms that have been present in public administration since 1980. This caused a fragmentation of public administration, which created obstacles to coherent formulation and implementation of policies and an absence of effective control mechanisms from the political center. Therefore, a re-affirmation of structural and functional tools for the accomplishment of a primarily hierarchical type of coordination has been noticed recently. This article presents tendencies that argue in favor of re-bureaucratization as a potential new administrative doctrine which presupposes hierarchy as a key mechanism for the accomplishment of coordination goals, and implies strengthening of directional capacities of the political center and firmer control over various aspects of the policy process. The authors aim to confirm this argument in the comparative part of the article, which provides a comparative analysis of four countries: Great Britain, France, Sweden and Croatia, and which shows the method for accomplishment of coordination from the center of executive power with reliance on the dominantly hierarchical type of coordination instruments.
Keywords
coordination; administrative reforms; joined-up government; re-bureaucratization; hierarchy; networks
Hrčak ID:
123094
URI
Publication date:
30.4.2014.
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