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This volume aims to conduct a comparative analysis on both implementation and effects of joined-up reform initiatives on local government level in about eight countries, using the Pollitt and Bouckaert (2011) model of public management reform as the conceptual basis for comparison.

Reforms inspired by New Public Management have raised many challenges to governments in various countries and on various levels, such as path dependencies, long time lags between implementation and results, co-ordination among different levels of government and mediocre support from public sector stakeholders. Negative effects such as fragmentation, disintegration, anomalies and paradoxes have been discussed extensively in the literature. Today we find that "Joined-up government" (JUG) modernization programs (as one strand of Post-New Public Management reforms) are increasingly implemented, and this idea can be seen to a large extent as a reaction to the effects of NPM measures (6 2004).

In this context, the articles of this volume seek to identify what JUG-initiatives have been discussed and implemented especially on the level of European local governments, and what the outcomes of the reforms are. Multiple case studies will analyse a selected municipality in each country with the aim to point at major reform trends and causalities. In addition, the results of the multiple case studies will be integrated in a summarizing introductory chapter that analyses the theoretical, methodological and practical implications of the findings.

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The term ´Joined-up Government´ (JUG) originates from the United Kingdom and was connected to the Labour Government of Tony Blair, which attempted to achieve and maintain cohesion of an ever more complex-growing public sector via JUG initiatives. Later, JUG has become an umbrella concept for various ways of coordinating public sector activities in order to achieve today´s governments´ objectives. This volume takes a comparative analytical approach on both the implementation and effects of reform initiatives in six different European countries (Austria, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy and Norway). It focuses on the local government level, which has been and still is subject to a range of partly contradictory reform pressures all over Europe, not least because of the financial crisis. This book gives an empirical account of how JUG initiatives manifest in local governments and to what extent planned reforms actually ´deliver´ on their promises. A second interest is whether such activities represent yet another layer of equally motivated managerialist reforms, or are attempts to reverse earlier New Public Management (NPM)-inspired initiatives. The volume includes a discussion of success factors of JUG initiatives and raises several issues for practitioners.

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Leixnering, Stephan
Dr. Stephan Leixnering ist am Institut für Organization Studies an der Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien tätig.

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