Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - TROPICO (Transforming into Open, Innovative and Collaborative Governments)

Teaser

The TROPICO project (Transforming into Open, Innovative and Collaborative Governments) aims to comparatively examine how public administrations are transformed to enhance collaboration in policy design and service delivery, advancing the participation of public, private and...

Summary

The TROPICO project (Transforming into Open, Innovative and Collaborative Governments) aims to comparatively examine how public administrations are transformed to enhance collaboration in policy design and service delivery, advancing the participation of public, private and societal actors. It analyses collaboration in and by governments, with a special emphasis on the use of information and communication technologies (ICT), and its consequences.

The project rests on four pillars:

Pillar 1 assesses the institutional conditions and individual drivers and barriers for the transformation of governments towards greater collaboration. State structures, administrative traditions, but also individual attitudes, skills, and expertise of officials play a decisive role.

Pillar 2 examines collaboration practices within governments. We study the actors and means of innovative collaboration, including ICT, and how they are interlinked.

Pillar 3 focuses on collaboration between public, private and societal actors for policy design and service delivery, looking into front line offices as well as novel public-private partnerships.

Pillar 4 examines the effects of collaboration for legitimacy, accountability and government efficiency is essential to provide a comprehensive analysis of the transformation towards open, innovative, and collaborative governments. The project has a comparative approach and examines collaboration in ten European countries. The ten countries reflect different administrative traditions in Europe: Nordic (Norway, Denmark), Continental (Germany, Netherlands), Central and Eastern European (Estonia, Hungary), Napoleonic (France, Spain; Belgium), and Anglo-Saxon (United Kingdom).

The specific objectives of TROPICO are to:
- Ascertain institutional conditions shaping and enabling collaboration in Europe
- Analyse individuals attitudes, skills, knowledge, and incentives for collaboration, including civil servants, stakeholders and users
- Study the emergence and nature of collaboration practices in policy design within governments, emphasizing the relevance of ICT
- Examine the conditions and practices of collaboration in policy design involving public, private, and civil society actors and how user-knowledge is integrated in these processes
- Study the progress and extent of innovative collaboration practices in service delivery within governments
- Analyse different types of partnerships of stakeholders and users in delivering innovative services (incl. Public Private Partnerships and network-like innovation partnerships)
- Assess the impact of novel open and innovative collaboration practices on legitimacy, accountability and government efficiency
- Discuss and reflect on the suitability and applicability of the key findings with stakeholders and users
- Advise policy-makers on the conditions, enablers and barriers, as well as good practices for the transformation towards open, innovative and collaborative governments

Work performed

In the first reporting period (M1-M12) the work in TROPICO has primarily concentrated on two specific objectives; to ascertain the institutional legal, political, and historical conditions shaping and enabling collaboration in and by governments in Europe (WP2) and to analyse the attitudes, skills, knowledge, and incentives for individual actors involved in transforming collaboration, including civil servants, stakeholders and users (WP3).

WP2 finalised three deliverables in the first reporting period. A literature and research report (D2.1) provides an extensive review of global academic and ‘grey literature’ on collaboration in ten European countries: Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Hungary, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, and the United Kingdom, presenting a systematic review of how the collaboration concept is interpreted in the academic literature and other public reports from practitioners. It also presents a list of institutional factors that may facilitate or obstruct collaboration. The second report (D2.2.) presents a collection of “codes of collaboration”\' in these ten countries as codified in the countries’ constitutions, laws and statutory instruments. In addition to specific regulations on collaboration within governments and between governments and other actors, the collection includes existing formal regulations and other rules and guidelines for data protection and data sharing, as well as freedom of information regulations and frameworks that can be assumed to have an impact on collaboration. A following research report (D2.3) adds a comparative analysis of the collected codes of collaboration. The codes of collaboration are made available online through the TROPICO website.

During the first reporting period, WP3 designed and prepared an experimental study on public servants’ willingness to collaborate, using an innovative discrete choice experiment, which is to be distributed to civil servants at municipal level in five European countries: Belgium, Estonia, Germany, Norway and Spain. The experimental study itself and its results will be presented in two research reports (D3.1 and D3.2), in a following policy brief (D3.3) and in two following journal articles (D3.4)

Management issues (data management, data sharing and data protection) and dissemination (the TROPICO online presence, dissemination and exploitation plan) have also been in focus in the project during the first reporting period.

Final results

Knowledge on how to tackle the crucial transformation of governments to become more open, innovative, and collaborative is lacking. At the same time, new institutional strategies, and solutions to cope with the complex challenges and changing demands on public administrations are strongly needed, especially considering the ever-increasing number and variety of innovative technologies available.

The TROPICO project provides a uniquely integrated and comprehensive study on the drivers and barriers of collaboration, the dynamics and practices of collaboration, as well as their impact on legitimacy and efficiency, with a key emphasis on ICT. Its results will enable policy-makers but also stakeholders and users to address the transformation towards greater collaboration in and by governments. The project applies a truly comparative perspective, acknowledging the variety of public sectors in Europe but also involving the diversity of stakeholders\' and users\' perspectives. The project thereby delivers recommendations on immediate and medium-term policy responses and aim to enable the adoption of good practices across countries and sectors.

The project makes progress beyond the current state of the art by:

- enhancing our conceptual knowledge on collaboration;
- improving the cross-national comparability of findings by harmonizing methods, and by including ten countries covering the five dominant administrative traditions in Europe;
- expanding and strengthening the available empirical data on collaboration, especially with regard to detecting causal mechanisms and providing novel quantitative and qualitative data;
- taking into account the diversity of views by key actors in collaboration (public managers, private stakeholders, and users);
- moving beyond analyses of specific collaborative practices to focus on major trends and generalizable results, informing policy recommendations with broadest applicability

Website & more info

More info: http://www.tropico-project.eu.