Review of Public Administration and Management

Vertical vs. Horizontal Coordination in Public Administration

Fatih Demir^* Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Firat University, Elazig, Turkey
^*Correspondence: Fatih Demir, Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Firat University, Elazig, Turkey, Email:

Received: 12-Dec-2024, Manuscript No. RPAM-24-27765; Editor assigned: 17-Dec-2024, Pre QC No. RPAM-24-27765 (PQ); Reviewed: 31-Dec-2024, QC No. RPAM-24-27765; Revised: 10-Sep-2025, Manuscript No. RPAM-24-27765 (R); Published: 17-Sep-2025, DOI: 10.35248/2315-7844.25.13.477

Introduction

Horizontal coordination

In public administration, horizontal management refers to the need for increased coordination between different government departments and agencies in order to manage joint issues. This essentially involves ensuring the “coordination and management of a series of activities between two or more organizational units that have no hierarchical control over each other and whose purpose is to generate results that cannot be achieved by units working individually”. Chisholm refers to this phenomenon as “coordination in the absence of hierarchy”. In fact, he suggests favoring informal coordination when interdependent units encounter common problems rather than a traditional restructuring or centralization of power. In this sense, coordination is more like a solution to be implemented rather than a problem to be solved. This means that horizontal management designates structural forms that break with those in force in traditionally vertical management.

First, it should be recognized that when asked “Have you ever worked with other government departments, the private sector, or the public on public policy?” a significant number of civil servants will answer in the affirmative. Everyone has, at an initial or advanced stage, to a variable degree of decision-making, worked alongside public policies mobilizing some form of horizontal approach. The horizontal approach to public policy refers to a situation where any person or organization, when undertaking some reflection on a situation, (proceeds) to the formal exercise of asking who else has interests in such a case to want to associate this organization or this person with the development of the file in a perspective of general interest. In other words, the horizontal approach refers to “any joint activity by two or more organizations that aims to improve the public good by working together and not separately” by including “the processes and public policy and management decision-making structures. Some will talk about coordination, even management or governance, qualifying it as horizontal, cross-cutting, pangovernmental (whole-of-government), decompartmentalised (joined-up government), corporate, intersectoral. If each terminology has its share of nuances, each device corresponds to a certain gradation of the ambitions and means of the common effort.

There has recently been a resurgence of interest in policy and management coordination in most countries. This new trend translates into “whole of government” type perspectives such as the “joined-up government” in the United Kingdom, “horizontalism” in Canada, similar initiatives in Australia or the revision of the center (“reviewing the centre”) in New Zealand. Emphasis is also placed on horizontal collaboration and integrated service delivery between public organizations and levels of government, as well as consolidation of departments and the reintegration and standardization of agencies.

Denton and Ostroff use the notion of horizontality in reference to organizational structures with fewer levels than traditional bureaucracy and where the primary concern is the customer. For some authors, this meaning of horizontal management is equivalent to management by process. For example, proposes that “the horizontal company is organized around groups of processes”. A priori, this conception seems to move away from public management, but the paradigm of new public management and the reality of the reengineering of processes in the public sphere make this conception valid for the government apparatus. Indeed, in the constant concern to improve performance, many public organizations decide to resort to process reengineering and to revisit their ways of doing things. However, the scale of these reorganizations is more or less comparable to that of organizations in the private sector.

These two conceptions of horizontal management have in common that they seek to break with traditional hierarchical management as a solution to contemporary problems of public administration. They have their share of difficulties, including establishing a culture of collaboration and trust. For horizontal management concerning organizations whose certain activities are interdependent, it is necessary to establish a climate of trust to replace that of distrust and protection of the territories that previously prevailed between the organizations involved in horizontal management. For horizontal management applied to organizations revising their processes, it is also appropriate to create trust between organizational units when establishing processes and revising them. In both types of horizontal management, the mobilization of actors will be facilitated by a legitimate recognition of the need at the origin of this initiative and its implementation at an appropriate time. The leadership exercised by senior managers will also be a considerable asset. Finally, for the design of horizontal management linked to coordination, the way to manage the boundaries between the home organization (for example the ministry) and the temporary informal organization (the horizontal management initiative) will be important in terms of responsibility and accountability. The horizontal approach differs from, but is often complementary to, management in silos. While siloed management relies on vertical mechanisms established by organizations and replicated by actors, horizontal management relies on mechanisms co-developed by participating actors, modified as the situation progresses. Silo management is centered on a classic pre-established organizational chart structure for carrying out actions in a usual field (health, agriculture, work, etc.), while the horizontal approach is centered on a fluid structure for carrying out actions inscribed in an unusual field, one that is located either at the interfaces between the usual fields of action of the participants, or that reflects the interdependence of these. This approach is practiced within the same ministry, government, levels of government, or to associate the private, not-for-profit and public sectors, or even between national administrations.

The horizontal approach is in the spotlight in several countries. For example, the European Commission and Brazil are developing a training program on intersectoral coordination, and several sustainability reports mention the need for horizontal collaboration; in Argentina, the Cabinet of Ministers commissioned a study on the challenges of public policy coordination in Finland, the Prime Minister’s office has made it a strategic priority and in Canada, the Clerk of the Privy Council’s Blueprint 2020 vision supports the whole-ofgovernment approach. For example, the Canadian Federal Government has supported this type of management for several years: A working group of deputy ministers was set up in 1996, a database of horizontal policies exists since 2008, a state of governance of horizontal policies is available.

Types of mandates

The horizontal mechanisms are differentiated by their specific mandate: Some are places for exchanging information and where few or no decisions are taken; others allow you to choose the content of a project, its update, its implementation and possibly its evaluation; others, finally, are based on the sharing and strengthening of expertise in a particular field or administrative function.

Horizontal approaches can materialize through formal or informal networks. The formal networks involve formal structures, individuals linked by their roles and responsibilities towards their organization and most often solicit interpersonal relationships that develop through a hierarchical process. Informal networks develop through interpersonal relationships that are not necessarily linked to a hierarchical process and most often outside of institutional procedures.

Another difference between horizontal devices comes from the very object that is subjected to the horizontal approach. Two scenarios can be distinguished. It is possible to coordinate projects, programs and policies whose components are sectoral and under the full governance of each of the competent jurisdictions (e.g., the fight against street gangs involves the Ministries of Health and Social Services, Justice, Public Security, etc.). These policies can be developed upstream in a silo management mode, then, during implementation, some collaboration is requested or required from partner organizations and departments. We would then speak of a horizontal approach to several policies or a multisectoral policy. Another scenario is the coordination of an intersectoral action that is developed in concert with several sectoral organizations or ministries. It is then more of a co-construction or co-development of a single policy rather than the juxtaposition of a set of separate policies. We would then also speak of a horizontal approach, but for an intersectoral policy. Thus, horizontality can refer both to the pooling of existing sectoral policies and to a common policy.

A public organization can occupy one of the following three positions within a horizontal approach: leader, partner, administrator. A leader organization coordinates. The other organizations are then partners. When coordination is exercised by an organization outside the group, it then occupies the position of third-party administrator. There are three types of network governance structure: The “leader organization” model calls for governance that may tend to be centralized; that of “governance by partners” is based on leadership and shared interventions among network participants; and the model of “governance by a responsible administration in charge of the network” is based on a new structure in charge of the governance of the network. The methods of interaction, decision-making, communication, and the related issues may vary depending on the type of governance chosen to lead the horizontal approach. A manager will thus have to define and adjust the respective roles, tools and modes of communication relevant to a given horizontal approach.

So far, the basics of administrative law have not spoken of governance, but of vertical and horizontal coordination. If vertical coordination can be understood as the most coherent and consistent orientation of the organization towards common goals in a hierarchical constellation of different actors, horizontal coordination pursues the same objective in a rather diffuse power and dominance structure of a network. The need for horizontal coordination increases the more differentiated and technically specialized an administration is Peters. The department principle ensures “negative coordination”. This is understood as the minimum requirement for government and administrative activity, in which the actors involved agree on a certain autonomy in their areas of responsibility. The form of “positive coordination”, on the other hand, which is intended to ensure coherent programs across organizational and political areas and to ensure compliance with standards, is much more difficult to produce and can conflict with vertical coordination. For example in Germany, the cross-departmental coordination of the overall planning of the Federal Council, understood here as horizontal coordination, is carried out by the Federal Chancellery. However, the annual targets, for which the Federal Chancellery ensures coordination, are only formally acknowledged by the Federal Council, “which is why they remain in the planning of the departments”. In this sense, the importance of vertical and negative coordination is ultimately placed above that of horizontal, positive coordination; a circumstance that should not come as a surprise given the structure of the executive as a collegial authority. The positive horizontal coordination can be achieved through two forms of permanent bodies: In the form of conferences or in the form of independent administrative units. The first includes the supreme coordination body of the federal administration, the General Secretaries’ Conference (GSK), which, under the direction of the Federal Chancellor, controls the coordination activities in the federal administration. These two forms differ in terms of their degree of organization. Conferences are “organisationally less pronounced and their members remain in their traditional units”. As a result, the members are still primarily tied to the line organization of the departments. Administrative units with overarching staff, planning and coordination tasks, on the other hand, are organizationally subordinate to the political leadership of a department head or a federal chancellor. The existing committees with regard to tasks and competencies are described in more detail below.

Literature Review

General advantages of the horizontal approach

Why would a horizontal approach engage individuals and organizations? Because actors acutely perceive the following goals: to share information, such as the Center for Integrated Terrorism Assessment in Canada, to prevent conflicts or put an end to them, to optimize the use of resources that have become rare (operations support services that are shared locally), to coordinate action, to have a better impact on the desired results, and to deal with crises to create a common culture or a common approach to problematic. Depending on the case, certain horizontal management approaches serve better the consideration of the development of public policies.

The horizontal approach to public policy seems essential for several reasons: The issues are multifactorial, particularly with regard to the determinants of policies for which several ministries are responsible. In addition, the action on the populations relies on the public system as well as on the coordination of the interventions of private actors and citizens. The context of effective public action calls for optimal use of public resources without duplication of services. The state, which has limited resources despite the scale of the social and economic challenges, must carry out its missions by having all the ministries work in a common direction. Thus, the horizontal approach to public policies seems unavoidable and is widely used within public administrations. Senior managers must devote a considerable amount of their time to it. An effective horizontal approach to public policies and public action responds to these challenges.

The horizontal approach is beneficial in several ways. Studies covering several areas show significant improvements in the speed of execution, management and scope of mandates. Indeed, short-term repercussions are felt on the dynamics of interactions between actors, conflict resolution and the genesis of innovative ideas. Some projects were able to progress more quickly with a horizontal approach than they would have done with management in silos. Leaders and managers questioned on the perceived advantages of horizontal coordination mention the following advantages:

• Horizontal collaboration honors a common interest for the ultimate beneficiary, , the population and the citizen. It is a question of projecting oneself beyond the conflicts linked to the protection of the respective territories and positioning one’s action for the benefit of the community and the taxpayer rather than for the benefit of one’s organization. It is therefore a displacement or a recentralisation on the primary action of the public actor in the service of citizens.

• A collective project is a priori motivating for stakeholders dedicated to effective public action. The motivation of human resources is based on tangible levers (for example, financing linked to performance in the private sector) and on intangible levers. Among these levers, the proposal of spaces where everyone feels useful, where everyone can contribute to the achievement of a common objective and where everyone learns from exchanges is greatly valued. Horizontal devices have the possibility of creating such spaces, as long as they are not places of unidirectional exchanges where no decisionmaking margin is possible.

• Experts from multiple sectors, organizations, jurisdictions share their knowledge and appeal to their rational minds. The complementarity and perspective of expertise for the benefit of a project or program of general interest must improve the content of the project.

• Each of the experts can be sensitized and learn from their colleagues, highlighting cross-learning. Eventually, updates are made on the evidence as well as on the developments in progress in the partner organizations. A more encompassing formulation of the project should emerge.

• Sometimes, the knowledge and clarification of the fields of action of each of the participants complement the scientific and empirical knowledge exchanged. Beyond the prejudices that feed the divergences in the positions of each participating actor, the exchanges must make it possible to reposition and clarify “the inter-organizational conflicts supported by the hierarchical pyramids”.

• Nothing affects taxpayers’ image of the inefficiency of public services more than conflicts between levels of government or between organizations at the same level. Public administrations must talk to each other and avoid acting as if the right hand and the left hand are not connected.

• It is possible to share the fixed costs of a project or program decided and implemented by several organizations (infrastructure, secretariat, communication strategy, etc.).

• Within government, a result is achieved at a lower cost when organizations do not duplicate their actions and do not hinder those of their neighbors, and when they create synergies with partners.

Problems of horizontal coordination

One of the main problems related to the horizontal coordination of public policies lies in the fact that organizations protect their jurisdiction, that is to say, the field of activity over which they exercise rights, develop policies and fulfill their operational responsibilities. The issue concerns the sharing of power and the way in which organizations should relate to each other to make decisions, solve problems, and develop projects. It is more difficult for two organizations that share the same ideologies and offer similar services to coordinate because these bodies are in competition for the same financial resources and the same clients. The losses arising from this are substantial for public administrations since organizations do not adapt their public policies to change. The fears that motivate the protection of jurisdictions are many, including the emergence of unnecessary conflicts, loss of jobs and professional expertise, shifting priorities and policies, dilution of liability and the need to develop and maintain consensus.

The horizontal control mentioned is in tension – or in some cases also in open conflict – with the vertical organizational structure of the departments and the direct attribution of political responsibility, as required by the constitutionally guaranteed department principle. Central aspects of New Public Management (NPM) such as competition, decentralization and corporate responsibility at official level can also conflict with horizontal control imperatives. In Switzerland, the central federal administration serves as a concrete object of investigation in the present work, whereby the focus should be on the staff unit of the Federal Council, the Federal Chancellery, to limit the object. The Federal Chancellery has, by definition, the legitimate role of advising and supporting the Federal Council in planning and coordination. With its internal perspective of the central administration, the question is therefore distinguished from questions about the optimal interaction of the federal levels in the area of digital transformation, as it is dealt with variously in connection with e-government Switzerland. In the following, the opportunities and risks associated with the use of digital services in public service provision will only be briefly discussed.

Innovative approaches always encounter particular obstacles. Here are five types of obstacles that apply to horizontal approaches. First of all, for innovative approaches and horizontal approaches, we can say that some barriers are specific to the initiative being considered. An initiative that is ambitious in its aims and means or its innovative perspective will generally face greater obstacles than an initiative with a smaller scope involving few actors. The socially or politically sensitive nature of an initiative will also create barriers. Peters also notes that the initiative that involves organizations with too similar or too dissimilar objectives presents particular challenges. The horizontal approach is therefore subject to encountering obstacles due to the involvement of a multiplicity of actors. The manager will therefore have to provide appropriate strategies, tools and even, if necessary, specific methods of horizontal work.

Secondly, there are problems related to the organizations involved. Relations between levels of government bring into conflict the divergent interests of organizations working for the same citizen and with his fiscal resources. However, competition between organizations can harm cooperation. It is necessary to be able, on both sides, to globalize the common perspective. Such globalizing approaches require, at least at the beginning, significant efforts as well as a lot of time. Some organizations see it as transactional costs deemed excessive. Some authors question whether organizations dedicate to it the political leadership and the leadership of the center, which are essential to the success of such initiatives. The horizontal approach manager must therefore promote a mode of communication conducive to the emergence of a common win-win perspective [1].

Cultural obstacles are also important: the corporatism and bureaucratic interests of organizations, the perception of acquired and exclusive jurisdictional rights create resistance. Competition for visibility, money and customers also plays a role. In these initiatives, frank and open cooperation should be preferred to domination, which breaks with the old ways of doing things. The horizontal approach manager must, for example, ensure fair valuation and adequate publicity of the respective interests of the participants.

Some obstacles are linked to individuals: will they be comfortable with the dual membership of the project team and their department? How will they manage their loyalty and their ethics, if the choices to be made become difficult? Will they lose sight of their career perspective: Will it be in the original organization or in the new networks thus created? The horizontal approach manager will thus have to anticipate possible conflicts linked to the dual affiliation of the actors (to their ministry and to the horizontal approach) and put in place adequate measures, such as the sharing of difficulties of loyalty and the search for compromises that do not jeopardize the success of the initiative.

Finally, other obstacles relate to the politico-administrative system. Traditional accountability for results, time, budget and risk management must accompany project development. Who will do the evaluation? According to what criteria? Who will assess the individuals participating in the project? How to evaluate a common performance? The new character of the formula requires candid and serene experimentation in these matters. The manager of a horizontal approach must provide tools (e.g. timetable negotiated according to the sectoral policies in progress and about to be made public) and appropriate monitoring and performance measurement methods (e.g. indicator and common objective, indicator of the coherence and duplication of government actions) to the project, but which satisfy the actors of the participating organizations [2].

In summary, it can be said that questions of horizontal coordination and ensuring cross-departmental coherence of political programs have been dealt with for a long time and that different institutional answers have been found. At conferences, the members remain tied to the line organization. Fundamental differences are escalated to the central or federal governments if an amicable solution cannot be found beforehand. In contrast, independent administrative units show a higher degree of organization and are organizationally subordinate to a magistrate. In the event of differences, they can in principle make the final decision. Conferences serve to ensure coordination although they do not provide for the making of generally binding resolutions.

Vertical coordination

In a context marked by the increased number of actors involved in local policies and the resulting fragmentation of resources (financial, of authority, and of expertise) among said actors, urban and local governance raises complex coordination issues. Faced with ever-changing public problems that can no longer be confined within the boundaries of local authorities than they can those of sector-specific divisions, coordination between state administrations and agencies, local bodies at different levels, and multiple public, para-public, joint, private, and non-profit organizations is a major challenge for these actors. It is also a question of primary importance for researchers analyzing urban and local policies.

This was already the case half a century ago, when the local arena was merely one in which to implement measures developed on the national level that were as horizontally compartmentalized (with each government department in a position of monopoly in its sector of activity) as they were vertically integrated, from central administrations to decentralized government services that covered the entire countries. The sociology of organized action, like the one developed in France at the Centre de Sociologie des Organisations (CSO) (Center for the Sociology of Organizations), was incidentally largely established around the study of what was then called the “local political-administrative system.” Analysis of this system revealed modes of operation that were a long way from the bureaucratic ideal type, with the compartmentalization of sectors and the firm hierarchization of actors accompanying incessant negotiations and arrangements between bureaucrats and local elected officials. Bureaucratic regulations therefore did not prohibit the existence of informal mechanisms of coordination between local actors, the analysis of which served as a basis for Crozier and Thoenig to construct a theoretical model of systematic regulation—“cross-regulation”— and, in a more political approach to the center-periphery relationship, for Grémion to formalize the notion of “tamed Jacobinism.”

The expression “vertical administrations” is usually used to designate, within the set of economic administrations, those whose competence extends to all the problems of a sector or a group of sectors of production. These administrations, which are in charge of agriculture, energy, processing industries, transport, etc., therefore differ from the so-called horizontal administrations whose activity covers certain problems common to all sectors: Prices, taxation, investments, foreign trade, etc. These first two categories of organizations coexist moreover with services which deal with economic questions from a “geographical” point of view, in the sense that they take into consideration human groups delimited in space: This is the case both offices in charge of regional development, town planning or the equipment of local communities as well as administrations in charge of relations with foreign countries or economic aid to underdeveloped countries [3].

If we accept that the vertical administrations are responsible for the tasks indicated above, a question immediately arises: what should be the decision-making power of the heads of these administrations? Or more precisely: What should be the respective share of vertical and horizontal services in the adoption of the measures implied by the management of the economy? The representatives of the two categories concerned profess divergent opinions on this subject. Most “vertical” officials do not deny the need for interdepartmental coordination; but they think that the powers granted to horizontal administrations are excessive. These administrations exceed their role of coordination by evoking and deciding the smallest cases. This regime of “direct administration” must be ended. An autonomy zone must be recognized for the technicians. To this, the civil servants of the horizontal services-roughly the senior executives of finance and economic affairs-answer that the powers of the technical services, although limited, are no less real. The leaders of these services have a “right of initiative” which no one dreams of depriving them of; very often, the decisions taken represent a compromise between the competing theses: It is therefore wrong to say that the technicians play no role.

Central government – local government relations

By making local authorities autonomous vis-a-vis the State, both in terms of decision-making and in terms of managing the means at their disposal, the decentralization texts have modified the model of territorial administration and introduced a new problem. In the previous system, the prefect was the key player responsible for ensuring the consistency of public action. It thus ensured the administrative coordination of the actions of the decentralized services as well as that of the local authorities (department and municipalities) which were subject to supervision. The new scheme of territorial administration, on the other hand, brings more local autonomy, but also greater complexity [4]. Nobody is responsible for the coherence of all public action. No institution has the legal and decision-making capacity to impose it. It is affirmed the equality between all the communities (absence of hierarchy and supervision), but the absence of rigorous division of competences is source of conflicts of competences, confusions, duplications or absence of interventions, in short, inconsistencies that undermine the effectiveness of public action. It thus appears that, in their very methodology, the principles on which the exercise of powers is based carry inconsistencies.

Discussion

Inter-organizational coordination is therefore not a new issue in local administration resulting from the changes experienced in this domain in the past few decades it is intrinsically linked to it. This is because the local arena is a sphere in which multiple public policies are implemented and therefore where interdependencies between these policies are visible. But this topic, which was addressed through the lens of national administrations and therefore according to state-centric approaches, both sectorial and vertical, by researchers in the 1990’s and 2000’s, is now being formulated and analyzed in more cross-sectoral and horizontal terms. This is because major changes have been brought about by decentralization, the national reforms that accompanied and extended it, and the internationalization/Europeanization of public policies, as well as the increasing power of regional and urban authorities, the growing role of private actors in public policies, the rise in all forms of circulation between regions at various scales, and the resulting socio-economic, urban, and environmental problems. Local administration is no longer based on the vertical orientation of standardized measures conceived and implemented by powerful national administrations, but on the mobilization of a multitude of public and private institutions and actors in the collaborative definition and application of ad hoc solutions to deal with problems, which are themselves expressed at the local level.

The success of the notion of urban governance, invented in the 1990's to understand transformations in the stakes, systems of actors, and modes of behaving in subnational public policies, attests to a noticeable evolution in the analytical frameworks applied to city governments, long focused on national administrations and state representatives’ relationships with local officials. This is because governance has corresponded to a change in analytical approach, from vertical coordination to horizontal cooperation, at times at the risk of masking the preservation of a form of state centrality and the specific role that the state was able to continue to play in the production of subnational policies after decentralization.

In France, it was paradoxically thanks to institutional reforms in the first decade of the 2000’s that the question of vertical relationships, between the state and subnational authorities, again became less peripheral to research on governance. Although this observation appears contradictory, it is because reforms concerning both local authorities and state organization and instrumentation, combined to greatly accelerate the withdrawal of state involvement at the local level. As a result of these reforms, decentralized government services lost a significant portion of the expertise and resources on which they had relied following decentralization to invigorate partnerships between various local stakeholders [5,6]. Reforms of the state’s decentralized administration and the complete transfer to local authorities of many public policies that they had until then jointly managed with decentralized government services thus seemed to complete the ninety-degree turn that coordination had taken, from vertical to horizontal, justifying after the fact the disappearance of the state from analyses of regional or urban governance. In reality, the opposite was observed: The marginalization of decentralized government services was accompanied by new forms of state subnational intervention and a strengthened role in the piloting of many urban and local policies, which led to the state’s reintroduction into discussions on the urban and local governance in France.

Combination of horizontal and vertical coordination

The discussions in the previous sections indicate that coordination must work on both a horizontal and a vertical plane. Horizontal integration means coordinating the political areas on a specific topic. It usually refers to all actors working at this level, even if some have a function in a national or regional ministry, e.g., in a local office of the employment office. Vertical integration is concerned with bringing together policies from different administrative levels for the people and places affected. In our case, the vertical dimension refers to the relationship between policies at national level, at regional level, and municipalities at city level. The last step is then the districts or neighborhoods, where the specific problems are addressed. When developing integrated approaches, it is important to keep a balance between “hard” investments such as new residential units, commercial developments or transport, and the “soft” investments such as liveliness, business development, training and cultural activities.

The boundaries that exist at each level within the vertical chain hardly correspond to the identity, economy, or society in the neighborhoods, cities, and regions. It’s usually best to tackle problems at the right level, even if that level may not fit the existing boundaries. As Albert Einstein said, “You can never solve a problem at the level at which it arose.” Had he been a specialist in urban policy rather than physics, he might have further argued that solutions are usually sought either at a higher spatial level than in the neighborhoods where they performed, or that sometimes you have to go straight down to the street. Various area-based regeneration efforts have not had good labor market results because all investments have been concentrated in very small, well-defined areas rather than recognizing that the labor market homeowners depend on is much larger than their neighborhood. Trying to create a selfcontained economy in a small part of town is an enterprise doomed to fail [7].

Horizontal integration is about organizing and coordinating policies in a given area. In URBACT, this effort is reflected in the creation of the local working groups, which bring together actors who know about the problem at hand - either because they are dealing with this issue in their department, company or agency, or because they are citizens or users of this service and know the problem from their own experience. Acknowledging the problem in all its complexity and trying to bring together all relevant actors is the first step in almost all integrated approaches. Although URBACT initially focused on area-based strategies in specific neighbourhoods, it has now broadened its approach to broader urban development issues such as the integration of Roma, dealing with young people who drop out of school or with science parks. In each area there are different groups of actors; for example, it is completely different when it comes to Roma integration than when it comes to developing science parks. Without concerted efforts and incentives to bring the various political “steeples” together, departments would retreat to their own areas of focus. Central governments often compound departmental thinking by devolving funding and decision-making through a vertical system, so that at the local level a department or agency ‘owns’ the funding. This happens in almost all policy areas. The Structural Funds are partly to blame because they have a separate Regional Development Fund and a Social Fund that operate independently and are coordinated by different managing bodies, often at different levels of government. It is much more difficult to achieve policy coordination when funds operate so independently.

The result is that the state is responsible for ensuring that services are provided properly, efficiently and effectively (possibly also economically). Public management and the entrepreneurial state are gaining in importance as a result of this demanding form of performance. With regard to the effectiveness of public service provision, governance means a substantial level of coordination not only within the public sector but also between the public and private sector. This interactive conception of governing assumes that hierarchical control through governments will be less effective in generating coordination than will more collaborative interactions among social actors, with or without the public sector being involved. The research focus on governance in the field of tension between hierarchy, market and network is often on the interaction of state service provision and interest organization in “public policies”. In this way, conventional, ideal-typical notions of state action, which stand in the tradition of Max Weber’s mechanical bureaucracy model, are contrasted with more experience-saturated notions of participatory processes of participation and representation of interests in a political arena [8]. This aspect of governance also plays a role in the design of digital services, especially when data models and ICT specialist applications are affected at the various federal levels and when questions of public procurement and financing models such as Public-Private Partnership (PPP) to be added [9].

Conclusion

Advocates of the pre-eminence of horizontal services add that coordination, in the economic order, only makes sense and is effective if it relates to specific points (product prices, customs tariffs). Finally, the major argument they give to legitimize what one of them called their “power of co-management” is that vertical administrations have an invincible tendency to become unconditional defenders of their clientele: It is therefore necessary that they be placed under the supervision of administrators with greater independence of judgment.

The concept of governance allows us to recognize fragmentation and inconsistency, and suggests an emphasis on forms of vertical and horizontal coordination in public action. It helps us to better take into account the strategic ability of actors, the diversity of processes of legitimization, the negotiation dynamic between actors. This term also aims to mark the end of the era of the development of collective services and a nonetheless hierarchical style of relationships with the central government. Governance also denotes a changed view of governing, the structures and processes of “policy making”, especially in terms of policy formulation and implementation. New forms of cooperation between state and non-state actors, horizontal coordination and integration, trust and legitimacy are increasingly attracting the attention of research and are seen as an opportunity to gain political freedom (and no longer just as an obstacle to the implementation of public interest-oriented politics). Governance as a new concept of government (and not just as an abbreviation for the analysis of government structures and processes) thus increasingly questions the traditional understanding and instruments of political behavior and control, and this particularly affects public administration, which in the traditional understanding of policy making the role of the central authority for the preparation and implementation (also enforcement) of policy (content).

Ritz and Thom paradigmatically embed the concept of governance in various reform concepts of the last decades. Against the background of the reforms of the New Public Management and other liberal-conservative and neoliberal concepts of the “minimal state”, the question of better governance in the “activating state” or guarantee state is the focus of the modernization discussions from the turn of the millennium. “Public governance” describes complex forms of interaction between government, administration and social or market actors. There is a move away from a primarily hierarchical understanding of government and administrative activities, even if control, coordination and control are still central components of executive and administrative tasks. However, as early as the 1970’s, social science theory formation turned away from the concept of control, as it implied the idea of a central control authority that could assert its interests hierarchically. From now on, the focus was on negotiation processes and partnership-based cooperation, albeit still in the “shadow of the hierarchy”. Horizontal coordination and control is a challenge, especially for a government that is organized vertically, is highly differentiated and is based on the departmental principle–but it is a familiar one. Peters also speaks of the “philosopher’s stone for government”. Correspondingly, processes and institutions have been formed in those areas where this need for coordination has long been evident: in communication, in procurement, in contract management, in financial and personnel planning. Most of these institutional solutions serve their purpose.

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