International Review of Administrative Sciences

http://ras.sagepub.com/ Moving towards integrated public governance: improving service delivery through community engagement
Kenneth Kernaghan International Review of Administrative Sciences 2009 75: 239 DOI: 10.1177/0020852309104174 The online version of this article can be found at: http://ras.sagepub.com/content/75/2/239

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International Review of Administrative Sciences

Moving towards integrated public governance: improving service delivery through community engagement Kenneth Kernaghan
Abstract Community engagement for improved citizen-centred service is an important dimension of Integrated Service Delivery (ISD), which is in turn a central component of the movement towards Integrated Public Governance. The experience of such organizations as Centrelink and Service Canada can inform thinking and action on the community engagement activities of ISD organizations in general. Most of these organizations are at an early stage in the use of innovative approaches to community engagement, but many of them are well positioned to use their physical presence in local offices across their jurisdiction to enhance service delivery. This article examines eight ISD organizations in four countries as a basis for discussing such matters as the benefits and challenges of community engagement, the nature of the engagement, and the means by which these organizations have fostered it. For ISD organizations to leverage their community presence, they must collaborate with a wide variety of community stakeholders.

Points for practitioners Integrated Service Delivery (ISD) organizations can leverage their physical presence in local communities to improve service for individual citizens. This community engagement activity can take the form of partnerships, consultations and contracts. The corporate level can support community engagement through administrative structures and processes and through training opportunities and learning tools. Each local office needs an appropriate measure of discretion and flexibility to adapt its engagement activities to the communitys particular challenges and resources. The movement in public management towards Integrated

Kenneth Kernaghan is Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Management, Brock University, St. Catherines, Ontario, Canada.
The authors, 2009. Reprints and Permissions: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav Vol 75(2):239254 [DOI:10.1177/0020852309104174]

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Public Governance and the anticipated increase in the delivery of government services by private and third sector organizations point to the need for collaborative community engagement. There are significant barriers as well as benefits associated with the community engagement activities of ISD organizations. Keywords: administrative organization and structures, networks, partnerships, public management, public sector reform, service delivery

Introduction
During the past decade, the concept of single-window service delivery has become an integral part of mainstream thinking and practice in the management of public organizations. Governments around the world have adopted single-window arrangements to improve service to citizens and promote cost-efficiency. Increasingly, the term single-window service (or one-stop shopping) is giving way to the term Integrated Service Delivery (ISD) defined as bringing together and fitting together related government services so that citizens can access them in a single seamless experience based on their wants and needs (Kernaghan, 2007: 103). This term captures the collaborative or joined-up emphasis of current innovations in government service delivery. Moreover, ISD is a central feature of a broader movement in public administration described below as Integrated Public Governance (IPG). An increasingly popular form of ISD organization is the government-wide service delivery organization, like Australias Centrelink and Service Canada, that provides a range of different kinds of services from various programme areas. This type of government organization, which is often described as a service department store, is the major service integrator in its jurisdiction. It can be distinguished from other ISD organizations and initiatives, like those serving seniors or families, that are more like boutiques in that they have a specialized focus. While this article is based primarily on the experience of the department store variety of ISD organization, reference is also made to more narrowly focused initiatives. Some of these latter organizations are very large in their geographic reach and number of employees (e.g. the UKs Jobcentre Plus has 800 offices). Many ISD organizations are well positioned to improve service to citizens through vigorous and creative community engagement. They can engage stakeholders by using their physical presence at the community level to contribute to innovative service delivery. Some of these organizations have a pervasive presence, in the form of service centres, in local communities across their jurisdiction. For example, 95 percent of Australias population is within 20 kilometres of a Centrelink office, and Service Canadas offices reach 95 percent of Canadians within 50 kilometres of where they live. Each organization has well over 300 service centres. Moreover, these organizations can support their in-person service through other delivery channels, especially the Internet and call centres. This article examines the community engagement activities of several ISD organizations for the purpose of informing thinking and action in this sphere by ISD organizations in general. The first section of the article explains the relationship between IPG, ISD and community engagement. This is followed by sections dealing in turn
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with the meaning of community engagement in the context of ISD; the benefits of community engagement activities; the extent to which ISD organizations have engaged stakeholders in local communities; the nature of the engagement; the means by which the organizations have supported community engagement; the degree to which engagement activities are integrated into the organizations strategic objectives; and the extent to which the outcomes of these activities are being measured. The final section outlines learning points on ISD at the community level. The article draws on the experience of five of the most advanced ISD organizations in the realm of community engagement, namely Australias Centrelink (which is the most advanced); Jobcentre Plus (JCP) (an executive agency of the UKs Department for Work and Pensions); Service Canada; Service SA (South Australia); and Strengthening Families Local Collaboration (a New Zealand family services initiative). Reference is also made to the experience of three other ISD initiatives the Front Office Shared Services project (United Kingdom), ServiceOntario (Canada), and Smart Service Queenslands Government Agents Program (Australia). The scope of the article is limited to the community engagement regime of ISD initiatives. It does not cover the wide range of community engagement activities conducted by other forms of public organization. Six of the eight initiatives noted above were selected on the basis of a broad study (Kernaghan, 2008) of 20 ISD organizations in five countries (Australia, Canada, Ireland, the United Kingdom, and the United States). Consultations with ISD experts in these countries led to the identification of two additional initiatives that were worthy of special examination. The study examined the advantages and deficiencies of the major organizational, governance and business models of ISD organizations, the challenges to designing and implementing effective ISD organizations, the means of overcoming these challenges, and innovative ISD models and practices. Through email communications and telephone interviews, each organization responded to a lengthy list of questions, including a set of questions bearing directly on community engagement. This study found that the experience of most ISD organizations with community engagement is quite limited, or relatively unsophisticated, or both. A separate set of case studies was prepared on the community engagement efforts of the six organizations that were most advanced in their thinking and/or action in this sphere and of the two additional organizations. The data for these case studies were obtained from the organizations email responses to a list of questions, complemented by telephone interviews and government documentation. The research questions included an examination of the extent to which the organizations had engaged stakeholders in communities, used their network presence and participation at the community level to improve service delivery, and sought partnerships with not-for-profit and other NGOs to support service delivery. Data were also sought on both the benefits and the challenges associated with community engagement activities.

Integrated Public Governance and Integrated Service Delivery

The pursuit of collaboration at the community level is in line with the recent emergence of a new period in the evolution of public administration and management a period of Integrated Public Governance (IPG).1 It involves
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the exercise of power, authority and/or influence by a broad range of political actors, including citizens and groups that involves the joining up of policies, programs, services, structures, processes and systems in arrangements that extend across departmental, governmental and/or sector boundaries (Kernaghan, 2008).

Community engagement for improved service to individuals is an important dimension of ISD, which is in turn a central component of the movement towards IPG. This movement is accompanied by a relative de-emphasis of the hierarchical and market models of public organization. Indeed, a transition is under way from the era of New Public Management (NPM), dating from the mid-1980s, to the collaborative emphasis of IPG (6 et al., 2002; Szirom et al., 2002; Entwhistle and Martin, 2005; Halligan, 2007a, 2007b; Hess and Adams, 2007; Kernaghan, 2008). Hess and Adams (2007: 2) argue, with specific reference to community knowledge and Australian experience, that there is a move to balance the market instruments of NPM by bringing community oriented instruments and community based knowledge upon which these depend into public policy and management. Learning points on the involvement of service delivery agencies in community engagement can be drawn from scholarly writings on collaboration and the closely related concepts of coordination and cooperation the three Cs (Keast et al., 2007). A focus on collaboration in public organizations is found in a growing number of studies under such titles as collaborative government (Deloitte 2008), collaborative governance (Donahue, 2004), collaborative public management (Leach, 2006; OLeary et al., 2006) and the collaborative state. However, theory and practice relating to collaboration in public organizations has a long history (Pollitt, 2003: 36; McGuire, 2006; Goss, 2007; Keast et al., 2007). In recent history, especially in the UK and other OECD countries, the three Cs have often been studied and practised under the rubric of joined-up government (JUG). In a survey of the meanings and objectives of JUG, Pollitt (2003: 36) notes that its goals include removing tensions and clashes between different policies, eliminating duplication or conflict between programmes so as to make better use of resources, creating synergies by bringing together the main stakeholders in a specific policy area, and promoting integrated or seamless service for citizens. The objectives of community engagement by ISD agencies are closely aligned with these goals. Pollitt (2003: 467) cautions, however, that JUG should be viewed as a long-term project, as a selective project (to be used only in the right circumstances), and as cooperative (not imposed from the top and involving interaction among a variety of stakeholders). Both early and contemporary theoretical writings on collaboration and on such closely related topics as coordination and partnerships identify a large number of barriers to putting these concepts into practice (Peters, 1998; Huxham, 2003; Agranoff, 2006; Quirk, 2007; Tam, 2007). This literature draws attention to the many obstacles to achieving and sustaining joint action within and across departments, across governments, and between government organizations and the private and not-for-profit sectors. The emphasis during the past decade on improving service to citizens through ISD has helped to reinvigorate the traditional debate over the
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benefits of pursuing the three Cs in public organizations. Research on ISD has been especially active in the federal states of Australia and Canada where inter-jurisdictional collaboration offers the prospect of both improved service and cost savings. Notable in these states also is the creation since the mid-1990s, but especially during the early years of this century, of government-wide service delivery organizations such as Centrelink (and its state counterparts like Smart Service Queensland and Service South Australia) and Service Canada (and its provincial counterparts like Service New Brunswick and Access Nova Scotia). Centrelink has been the focus of much of the Australian research. Winkworth (2005) examines Centrelinks partnerships with the community and business sectors to address social problems. She concludes that service delivery agencies like Centrelink are well positioned to foster trust with local service providers and other community groups, and that partnerships among these actors can create new opportunities for disadvantaged individuals and communities. Halligan (2007a, 2007b) notes both the benefits and tensions that arose from Centrelinks creative design the functional separation of delivery and purchase-provider combined with horizontal integration of delivery, as well as the agencys movement over time towards closer relations with communities. Keast and Brown (2006: 41) contend, with particular reference to the community sector in Australia, that network-based models between governments and communities can reduce programme fragmentation, promote seamless service, and help to resolve difficult social problems. Yet governments often fail to make the changes in power sharing and resource allocation required for successful collaboration. Research on single-window initiatives in Canada (Bent et al., 1999) identified the striking variety of such initiatives and the problems associated with their design and implementation. Kernaghan and Berardi (2001) studied single-window initiatives in Canada and in several other countries as a basis for examining the implications of these collaborative efforts for achieving seamless service. They draw attention to the issues for democratic accountability arising from the central role of public servants in innovative service delivery arrangements, their collaboration with non-governmental service providers and the consequent blurring of organizational boundaries. Roy (2006) uses the example of Service Canada to illustrate the challenges of providing electronic services to citizens in a multi-channel environment where the challenges include difficult governance as well as technological ones. Flumian et al. (2007) also use a case study of Service Canada to highlight the importance for ISD of creating a service excellence culture among employees; understanding that online services are just an initial step towards service integration across channels, departments and governments; and recognizing that the objectives of ISD can go beyond improved service and cost savings to enhance citizens trust and confidence in government. Based on a review of scholarly writings and of ISD initiatives in several countries, Kernaghan (2007: 11119; 2008: 69) classified the barriers to ISD into four categories, namely political/legal, structural, operational/managerial, and cultural. The ISD initiatives examined for this article illustrate the potential benefits of community engagement but also provide examples of barriers from each of the four categories. The recent upsurge of scholarly and practical interest in collaboration and integration is in part a result of advances in information and communication technologies
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(ICTs) that allow extensive and rapid exchange of information (Fountain, 2001; Borins et al., 2007; Dunleavy et al., 2007). Integrated Service Delivery has been strongly driven by the use of ICTs, especially by the increased use of the Internet channel. The Internet serves as the information backbone for governments multi-channel delivery system, but public demand for the telephone and in-person channels persists (Fleishman Hillard, 2006: 312; Smart Service Queensland, 2007: 19). Citizens want to receive the level of service they require through each delivery channel, regardless of their social, demographic, geographical, or technological circumstances (Kernaghan, 2007: 1312). The major ISD initiatives examined in this study serve community needs through all of the main delivery channels.

What is community engagement?

Community engagement is a complex concept that can be interpreted in several different ways. McCabe et al. (2006: 7) distinguish three formulations of community as geographic location, as interest, and as governance or engagement. They argue that the latter involves a higher level of engagement that goes beyond its precursors of community development and community capacity building. Community engagement engenders the participation of individuals and communities in discourse or engaged dialogue regarding relevant policies or service decisions. The process involves information gathering, consultation and participation simultaneously working together to form a consensus of community needs and agencys mandate (2006: 11). This is the type of community engagement envisaged by the ISD organizations examined in this article. Centrelink has developed a framework for conceptualizing advances in community engagement that depicts four levels of progress in improving service to customers, namely communicating (establishing effective relationships with groups who understand and serve the community), cooperating (for more accessible and integrated services), collaborating (to identify and address emerging community needs) and creating (identifying new opportunities, responses and services).2 Thus effective communication, cooperation and collaboration provide the foundation for creating new service opportunities. In moving community engagement to the higher levels of this framework, Centrelink argues that it can play an enabling role because, with its geographical spread across the country, it is in a unique position to share its resources, including human resources data, professional and specialist skills, information technology tools, buildings and other facilities to create these opportunities (Centrelink, 2007: 23). This aim is similar to Service Canadas objectives for community engagement:
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to develop management capacity for stakeholder engagement and feedback mechanisms to identify citizens needs and improve service delivery; to utilize its physical presence in communities to work closely with community groups and individuals to tailor services to the needs of citizens where they live; and to support its collaborative and partnership efforts with the voluntary sector to bring more integrated service offerings to communities across the country (Service Canada, 2007).
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Service Canada envisages its community engagement role as working beyond the office in each local community for the purposes of assessing the specific needs of clients and segments in that geographic community, providing access to information about services and programs to address those needs and using that information for continuous improvement of . . . service delivery approaches and service offerings. This work involves integration of services, insight, collaboration and outreach (Service Canada, 2007).

ISD benefits
Through community engagement activities, ISD organizations have the potential to improve substantially the quality of their service delivery. Centrelink (2007: 10) envisages the following broad range of benefits:
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increasing its capacity to build better relationships between the community and business sectors forming partnerships and developing solutions that might not otherwise be available for customers ensuring appropriate services are developed through a consultative process, which clearly identifies the needs of the partners ensuring that Centrelink understands the full range of impacts of a proposed initiative on the community and business sectors and can, therefore, take appropriate action building a positive profile for Centrelink in the wider community improving the view of Centrelink staff as approachable professionals, keen to be in touch with their communities increasing collaboration between Government, communities and local businesses improving job satisfaction for staff.

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The Front Office Shared Services project (2007) has identified the benefits of having public organizations and community agencies work together at the local level as reducing the amount of waste or duplicated work involved in delivering public services; fostering greater efficiency; stimulating the integration of back offices; improved staff morale; an enhanced role for the voluntary sector; and a focus on citizen-centred service.

Engaging community stakeholders

Virtually all ISD initiatives take the form of a partnership of some kind, involving the pooling of resources such as money, information and labour to meet complementary or compatible objectives with a sharing of decision-making power and of benefits and risks by the partners. For many ISD organizations, community engagement is interpreted largely as partnerships with one or more community actors. Some ISD organizations view community engagement even more narrowly as involving primaDownloaded from ras.sagepub.com at University of Birmingham on November 20, 2010

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rily consultation with various community actors affected by the organizations decisions. Still other ISD organizations see community engagement simply as receiving feedback on service performance by such means as citizen satisfaction surveys. A few ISD organizations pursue all three of these approaches. Centrelink is notable for the breadth of its community engagement activities. It is involved in two broad categories of partnerships. Community partnerships involve relationships with local community groups to improve day-to-day support for community residents and provide crisis support to individuals, groups or whole communities. Centrelink has, for example, utilized its physical presence and local networks to help ameliorate the effects of Australias prolonged and widespread drought. Consultative partnerships involve working with national Community Reference Groups that help Centrelink to understand better its customers needs and to target services more effectively in each community. The Groups give peak community organizations an opportunity to provide direct feedback to Centrelink, in a formal setting, on its services and its impact on the customers that the various organizations represent. Among these Groups are a Disability Customer Service Reference Group that works with peak disability bodies, and a National Multicultural Reference Group that works with peak community bodies representing persons from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Service SA has several contractual arrangements with Agents (i.e. not-for-profit and other NGO organizations) for the purpose of providing smaller rural and remote communities with access to government information and services. For example, in a brokerage role, Service SA strives to provide smaller rural communities with easier access to government information and services through its Rural Agent program. It also implements the APY (Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara) Lands Service Delivery Project that delivers a small number of services through a third-party Agent at remote Aboriginal locations in the far north of the state. The project aims to improve the effectiveness of direct service delivery to potentially marginalized South Australia communities in accordance with social inclusion, community and regional policy initiatives. Formal agreements between Service SA and its Agents set out the Agents obligations on a wide variety of matters, including confidentiality and timely and efficient service. These agreements also specify joint obligations on such matters as problem solving and dispute resolution. JCP is involved in a wide range of partnerships, including about 365 Local Strategic Partnerships (LSPs) in England. LSPs are a single local body that, among other responsibilities, provides a single overarching local coordination framework within which other partnerships can operate, and brings together at a local level the different parts of the public sector as well as the business, community and voluntary sectors. LSPs were established to tackle such issues as crime, jobs, education, health and housing issues that cut across many traditional boundaries between these sectors. JCPs district managers engage with local groups to ensure that effective liaison and service delivery arrangements are in place to help these organizations deal professionally with issues raised by their mutual customers. In addition, at the national level, JCP has identified 22 key Customer Representative Groups that it keeps up to date with JCP developments and that it consults on important changes to JCP services. JCP attests to the critical importance of its partnerships:

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Kernaghan Moving towards integrated public governance 247 [W]e could not effectively deliver our huge range of services without the cooperation of our delivery partners, our strategic partners and our stakeholders. And of course we must work closely with our Government partners to ensure the delivery of a seamless joined up service. Partnership working though is . . . a two way process and Jobcentre Plus has to give its partners the support they need. This means active and constructive management of partnerships and means listening and acting on partners concerns. (Jobcentre Plus, 2008)

When assessing existing and potential partnerships, JCP has to take account of a changing world of new initiatives and resource constraints. For example, it has statutory obligations to make an effective contribution to Local Area Agreements through membership of LSPs. Some ISD organizations have developed community partnerships with minimal or no funding. New Zealands Strengthening Families Local Collaboration (hereafter Strengthening Families) is a cross-sectoral, whole-of-government initiative that seeks to provide seamless service to vulnerable families through the collaboration of government agencies and community organizations. When this initiative was launched, there was little funding available at any level of its operation. The agencies involved made in-kind contributions of time and resources to establish and maintain the initiative in each community, but this was not sustainable over the long term. Making in-kind contributions proved to be more difficult for NGOs than for government agencies.

Forms of engagement
ISD organizations can engage communities, both pro-actively and reactively, in several ways. Centrelink uses partnerships, consultations and contracts. In addition to its community and consultative partnerships noted above, Centrelink is involved in a wide range of contractual relationships, both at the national and local levels. For example, it enters into contracts with many community organizations or groups to operate Access Points and Agents.3 The personnel in the contracted organizations are not Centrelink staff, but they are trained to respond to inquiries and will assist customers to access Centrelink online services or Centrelink staff through the telephone service. Centrelink has an extensive network of staff dealing with community and advocacy groups and, in some areas, with businesses. Some offices have well-formed relationships and participate in a variety of local activities, meetings and partnerships, but others are more reactive or ad hoc in their dealings with community groups and service providers. The challenge of ensuring fair treatment of smaller community groups was demonstrated by the National Audit Offices finding that inconsistent contact between these groups and Centrelink at the Area and local levels resulted in conflicting, and often incomplete, information being received by these groups, thereby posing a risk to the level of service delivery to the individuals who predominantly rely on assistance from such community groups (2007). Service SA has a contractual relationship with each of its Agents through an Agreement describing the legal arrangement between the Minister for Finance (Service SA administers the Agreement on behalf of the Minister) and the Agent (who is the provider of the defined services). Since the Agreement is a legal docuDownloaded from ras.sagepub.com at University of Birmingham on November 20, 2010

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ment, it focuses on the standard or minimum level of services to be delivered. It details by whom, where and what services are to be delivered. For the Strengthening Families initiative, engagement with community organizations can be either formal or informal. On a pro-active level, it may be contractual, such as funding an NGO to employ a Strengthening Families coordinator, but it can also be less formal, such as a staff member of an NGO attending Local Management Group (LMG)4 meetings to advise the local Strengthening Families operation. There is also such reactive work as LMG members working together and with other providers to meet a local challenge, such as a gap in services. Service Canada staff, on a regular but part-time basis, travel to communities that do not have an in-person office so that they can learn what services citizens need. The premises are usually owned or leased by Service Canada partners who have agreed to host Service Canada staff. Special outreach service is also provided to assist in times of need (e.g. assistance for those experiencing economic hardships in floodaffected rural communities).

Supporting community engagement

To foster community engagement, ISD organizations have put in place structures and processes to support stakeholder input and feedback. They also provide training or learning tools for employees on how to conduct community engagement activities. In terms of structures and processes, note that Centrelink, for example, in addition to its National Multicultural Reference Group, has a Multicultural Services Branch that focuses on improving service delivery to migrant and refugee communities through Centrelinks local offices. Multicultural Services Officers (MSOs) attached to these offices consult widely and receive client feedback on the impact of government initiatives in these communities. To support these and other local office staff, Customer Service Centre Managers are responsible for ensuring that Centrelink focuses on working closely with the local community and with non-governmental organizations that provide important community services. In the sphere of training and learning tools, several ISD organizations are striving to create a culture of service excellence throughout their ranks. It is essential that local office staff develop a strong commitment to successful community engagement as a component of their commitment to service excellence in general. This requires a culture change. Learning opportunities for local staff include formal training and development regarding the importance of serving beyond the office or stepping out into the community. Suitable learning materials must underpin these learning opportunities. In this connection, a branch within Centrelinks Families, Seniors, Rural and Community Division has developed learning materials to support those who are responsible for local community engagement and to promote the more consistent application of better practice approaches to the local engagement of community and business sectors. Service SA has also developed learning tools. Its Agreements with Agents refer to a Procedures Manual that incorporates hard copy handbooks and training manuals and sets out required information, instructions, guidelines and procedures for Agent staff on how to deliver the services as outlined in the Agreement.
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Service Canada has established Service Canada College to focus on training service experts as opposed to the traditional emphasis on training programme experts. The College aims to promote a commitment to service excellence by providing courses with a uniform curriculum across the country, integrating principles of service excellence into its courses, and recognizing the role of service providers as a profession and a career in the public service. Community engagement has recently been added as a component of the Colleges training.

Strategic alignment
In most ISD organizations, thinking and practice concerning community engagement is not advanced enough to be included in their strategic plans. However, one of Centrelinks 200708 strategic priorities was building better connections with the community. Centrelink also has a strategy to identify better practices for enhancing relationships locally with the community and business sectors. Its community engagement activities are integrated into its business planning and strategic objectives. Improving relationships with both the community and business sectors aims to support the achievement of Centrelinks business objectives. The main elements of Centrelinks Strategic Themes and Priorities that are directly relevant to community engagement are improving customer interaction through new service delivery initiatives and stakeholder engagement; developing a networked organization to strengthen collaboration with government and non-government organizations; and achieving consistent application of better practice in local engagement of the community and business sectors that will enhance information flows, consultations and the timely resolution of problems, and will support Centrelinks Strategic Result Indicators. For JCP, stakeholder engagement activities are directed from a strategic perspective from the Partnerships Division at the centre. This Division works closely with Business Strategy colleagues to integrate business and partnership strategies and determine the overarching partnership priorities. These are signed-off through the JCP Board before becoming part of the JCP Plan. This Plan is communicated to Regional External Relations Managers who work in conjunction with District colleagues to turn the overarching priorities into District engagement plans against which the priorities and resources are monitored.

Assessing performance
Very few ISD organizations have progressed far enough in their community engagement activities to measure the outputs, much less the outcomes, of these activities. Centrelink recognizes the need to assess its community engagement performance, but to date it has relied primarily on feedback through such mechanisms as the National Community Reference Groups, using customer comment cards, holding Value Creation workshops that provide a structured forum for Centrelink staff to hear customers concerns, and commissioning regular customer surveys. The surveys include a Community Sector Satisfaction Survey that details how satisfied providers are with their working relationships with their local Customer Service Centre.
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Centrelink understands that in order to provide assurance that appropriate and effective engagement activity with the community and business sectors is occurring, it will be necessary to measure at three levels, involving a gradual shift from processes to activity and then to outcome-based measures (Centrelink, 2007: 18). The Strengthening Families initiative attests to the difficulty of measuring the outputs of community engagement activities. Strengthening Families outcomes are linked to strong and resilient families. Positive relationships with community organizations and other stakeholders are considered in relation to effective collaboration. However, Strengthening Families acknowledges that collaboration is difficult to measure. Outputs count the number of inter-agency meetings that coordinators attend and the number of joint projects with which Local Management Groups are involved. This does not address the quality of relationships and is a long way from measuring outcomes. For JCP, most strategic partnerships set out measurable objectives at the outset, determined by business planning, against which the value of the partnership is monitored and reviewed. Each partnership will have differing objectives and timescales and in some instances formal Service Level Agreements (SLAs) or Memoranda of Understanding (MOUs) are drawn at either a national, regional or sub-regional level. These set out what the partnership has to deliver and when.

Concluding considerations
Community engagement is an emergent area in ISD. Most ISD organizations are at an early stage in their use of innovative approaches in this sphere. The foregoing examination of several of the most advanced initiatives identifies both the benefits and the barriers associated with community engagement activities. Many of the obstacles to successful ISD identified in theoretical writings are manifest in the community engagement experience of the initiatives discussed above. These initiatives have encountered challenges in the four categories set out earlier in this article. For example, there are political challenges such as responding to changes in governments policy focus and to new programs (Centrelink); structural challenges such as resource constraints (JCP); operational challenges such as measuring performance (Strengthening Families); and managerial challenges such as managing contracts (Service SA). However, meeting these challenges is not sufficient. Blacher and Adams, after examining collaboration with communities by the Department of Victorian Communities (DVC) in Victoria, Australia, concluded that without culture and skills being addressed, the structural and administrative changes necessary to build successful collaboration simply wont work (2007: 81). A major cultural challenge is overcoming ingrained resistance to change (Front Office Shared Services). The experience of the 22 ISD initiatives examined for this article supports Pollitts conclusions, based on a survey of scholarly writings and applicable to JUG in general, that JUG should be regarded as long-term, selective and cooperative. Centrelink is a comparatively long-term ISD agency it is both the oldest of the major service delivery agencies and the most advanced in respect of community engagement. Halligan notes that as public management moved from a market emphasis towards collaborative governance, Centrelink sought, among other things, new relations with comDownloaded from ras.sagepub.com at University of Birmingham on November 20, 2010

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munities (2007a: 460). Community engagement, in the advanced sense in which agencies like Centrelink and Service Canada interpret this term, is a later phase in the maturity of ISD organizations. The several challenges to ISD discussed above, including the need for adequate financial and human resources and for a culture change, help to explain the slow development of community engagement activities. A robust ISD agency will not necessarily select to create a sophisticated community engagement regime. Agencies may choose to focus their resources on other activities. ServiceOntario, with 70 Service Counters spread across the province, is well positioned to leverage its physical presence to improve service to individuals. It does not, however, take a vigorous corporate approach to community engagement. It used to devote more corporate effort to collaborative work in local communities, but it has since moved away from this approach and left community engagement primarily to its local staff. While ISD agencies like Centrelink provide strong corporate direction and support for community engagement, success rests largely on the extent of cooperation between local staff and key stakeholders. One of the key themes identified in a formal review of the Front Office Shared Services project was that while public services operate within a national policy context and are delivered by many different organizations . . . most are consumed locally in particular places and within particular communities, with their own demography and geography, physical and social infrastructure and needs and preferences. The design of services needs to reflect this (Front Office Shared Services, 2007: 5). This organizational design consideration is especially relevant to the community engagement activities of ISD organizations. As discovered by Centrelink and by Smart Services Queensland (Queensland, 2007: 8), one size does not fit all in approaches to community engagement. Each local office needs an appropriate measure of discretion and flexibility to adapt its engagement activities to the communitys particular challenges and resources. At the same time, the corporate level of ISD organizations can provide advice and assistance to their local offices in at least two broad categories. The first involves structures and processes such as Centrelinks national Community Reference Groups and its branches that focus on certain client segments (e.g. refugees and migrants). The second involves training and learning tools such as Service Canada Colleges training component on community engagement as part of its effort to promote a general culture of service excellence. Even ISD organizations with a small number of local offices can foster improved citizen-centred service through community engagement activities. However, large ISD initiatives like Centrelink, Jobcentre Plus and Service Canada can benefit substantially from corporate-level support and from the collection of data and innovations from local offices spread across their respective countries. Many ISD organizations are involved in an array of partnerships in local communities, and their employees often step outside the local office to provide outreach and pro-active services of various kinds. However, few of these organizations have been innovative in working beyond their office in sophisticated collaborative arrangements that take advantage of their physical presence in communities to improve service to individual citizens. If ISD organizations are to leverage effectively their community presence, they must collaborate more vigorously with a wide variety of stakeholders
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in each community, including third sector organizations, business firms, labour unions, and state/provincial and local governments (Winkworth, 2005: 33). The pursuit of collaborative arrangements between governments and a broad range of actors in each community is in keeping with the movement, noted earlier, towards IPG. The possibility of a syndicated services scenario being realized also supports such arrangements. This scenario envisages government services being delivered increasingly by not-for-profit and private sector organizations that are incentivized by considerations of community welfare or profit. The argument is that advances in information technology will enable the joining up of government services, and the linking of government, private sector and third sector services to be handled by organizations other than government ones. A likely result would be heavy reliance by governments on serving citizens through effective collaboration with nongovernmental service providers working in communities across each governments jurisdiction.

Notes
1 The term governance is variously defined. It is defined here as the institutions, structures and processes through which power, influence and authority are exercised, including the decisionmaking processes, that is, who participates and how. It includes participation in government decision-making by a wide range of actors within government and in civil society. The briefer term Integrated Governance was used in Szirom et al. (2002). See also Halligan (2007a: 461) for four dimensions of a model of integrated governance that shifted the focus to some extent from vertical to horizontal by emphasizing cross-agency programs and collaborative arrangements as well as the individual agencies. For an examination of Centrelinks efforts to implement this model, see Winkworth, 2005. Access Points provide only self-service facilities to enable customers to access Centrelink services by using a telephone to talk to a customer service officer, using a fax machine to send information to Centrelink, or obtaining Centrelink forms, brochures and information products. Agents, however, are established in locations that require a greater Centrelink presence than an Access Point. LMGs oversee the program in each area. They typically comprise frontline staff from the health, education, welfare, justice, housing and employment sectors, non-government agencies, and iwi/maori organizations and whanau support services.

2 3

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