Building bridges : cross-sector collaboration in youth policy

Abstract

Dubbed by Bauman (2013) as the age of uncertainty, the 21st century presents an increasingly fluid context (Tennyson, Harrison and Wisheart, 2008). Governments face turbulent and unpredictable environments that create a startling convergence of social, economic and political challenges (Fortin, 2013; Jones, 2011). Within such settings, public administrations have to deal with complex policy problems that seem ‘to go beyond problem resolution and management capacities’ of conventional institutions (Hage, Leroy and Willems, 2006: 4). Such issues, known as wicked problems (Rittel and Weber, 1973), ‘weave across organisational, professional and sectoral boundaries’ (Williams, 2012: 10) and require new understandings, processes and tools (Conklin, 2005). In an effort to deal with such intricacy, for the past three decades, political analysts began noting a paradigm shift in public policy processes (Meehan, 2003). Collaborative endeavours between the public, private and non-profit sectors, which came to be known as cross-sector collaboration (CSC), began to take shape and served as a catalyst for an ‘evolutionary change in institutional forms of governance’ (Selsky and Parker, 2005; Alter and Hage, 1993: 12).