ABSTRACT
Increasingly, public managers are faced with complex problems which require thinking and working across boundaries; they span agencies, portfolios and jurisdictions, necessitating actors to work across them. However, working in this manner requires inter-agency collaboration and cooperation and is based on the premise that important goals of public policy cannot be delivered through the separate activities of existing organizations. Such approaches are pursued due to common assumptions that the coordination or integration of activities will achieve a better result than each party acting individually, and that working across boundaries will enable more efficient and effective policy development, implementation and service delivery. However, in practice, constraints and barriers lead to less than optimal — and sometimes paradoxical — outcomes.
