{"id":266922,"date":"2019-02-08T11:30:44","date_gmt":"2019-02-08T16:30:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/policyoptions.irpp.org\/issues\/tools-for-horizontal-collaboration-in-government\/"},"modified":"2025-10-07T22:23:55","modified_gmt":"2025-10-08T02:23:55","slug":"tools-for-horizontal-collaboration-in-government","status":"publish","type":"issues","link":"https:\/\/policyoptions.irpp.org\/fr\/2019\/02\/tools-for-horizontal-collaboration-in-government\/","title":{"rendered":"Tools for horizontal collaboration in government"},"content":{"rendered":"

When the Mowat Centre recently asked public servants to identify the greatest challenges they face, most did not name big societal challenges like homelessness and climate change. Rather, the overwhelming majority pointed to the difficulties associated with working \u201chorizontally\u201d: that is, across departmental boundaries within government.<\/p>\n

This may seem counterintuitive, but it really shouldn\u2019t be. Why? Because the actual work of solving these big societal challenges inevitably sprawls across numerous departments \u2014 and, in Canada, often across multiple levels of government as well. Of course the size and complexity of these problems don\u2019t make solving them any easier, but the most important obstacles that public servants face as they tackle them day by day are the challenges associated with collaborating horizontally.<\/p>\n

Horizontal barriers <\/strong><\/p>\n

There is no single factor limiting horizontal collaboration in government. Rather, our research<\/a> identified at least seven key obstacles to collaborating horizontally<\/a>, ranging from insufficient resources to an underappreciation of the skills required.<\/p>\n

Overall, the most important of these is that in government, accountability is organized vertically. Because decision-makers are accountable for their department-specific responsibilities, aligning departmental priorities with a whole-of-government approach is difficult \u2014 especially when the distribution of the benefits of collaboration does not match the distribution of the costs.<\/p>\n

Horizontal tools<\/strong><\/p>\n

Daunting as these obstacles may be, many governments have nevertheless sought ways to encourage horizontal collaboration. In fact, our research uncovered more than a dozen different tools<\/a> that a variety of governments are using to do so.<\/p>\n

Some of these tools will be familiar to Canadian public servants. One example would be the designation of a lead department as primarily responsible for a project. Once designated, this department leads efforts at planning and coordinating with its partners, and if any resources had been specifically allocated to the project, it doles them out accordingly.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, many of these familiar tools are only partially or intermittently effective, and the urgent nature of many of the challenges facing Canadian governments requires more, and more innovative, solutions. We believe that the following three case studies of success from other jurisdictions can serve as helpful models for how to do horizontality better.<\/p>\n

The \u201conce only\u201d principle<\/strong><\/p>\n

In Estonia, the government\u2019s adoption of the \u201conce only\u201d principle means that once a citizen or a business has provided government with a piece of information, the government can\u2019t request that same information from them again. Rather, it is up to government to organize itself so that it is able to reuse that information internally if it needs it again.<\/p>\n

This principle was given legal effect through a 2007 amendment to Estonia\u2019s Public Information Act<\/a><\/em> that prohibited the creation of multiple government databases that held the same information. This change meant that Estonia\u2019s various government departments were forced to develop effective and secure systems for sharing information with each other.<\/p>\n

The legal entrenchment of the \u201conce only\u201d principle was possible only because of the Estonian government\u2019s creation, a few years earlier, of the X-Road<\/a>, a data exchange software layer that links all government departments as well as many private institutions such as the country\u2019s banks. But the legal entrenchment of the \u201conce only\u201d principle was a critical moment, as it shifted the cross-departmental collaboration enabled by the X-Road (and a number of associated initiatives) from a voluntary experiment attempted only by the digitally enthusiastic into an operational necessity.<\/p>\n

The results have been impressive. The digitization of government, of which the \u201conce only\u201d principle is a foundational component, produces annual savings for the Estonian state equivalent to 2 percent of GDP and has enabled exciting initiatives such as its innovative \u201ce-residency<\/a>\u201d program.<\/p>\n

Professional specialisms<\/strong><\/p>\n

By focusing on improving the ways in which it manages its people through its recognition of \u201cprofessional specialisms,\u201d the UK government has taken a different route toward improving horizontal collaboration. Professional specialisms<\/a> are groups of public servants who share well-defined professional skill sets. These range from the sorts of skills that any large organization requires \u2014 such as legal skills \u2014 to those that are more specific to government, such as policy skills.<\/p>\n

There are four key components to the UK\u2019s recognition of specialisms:<\/p>\n