Exploring the Potential for Collaborative Leadership through a Policy Lens: A Comparative Analysis of Children’s Services and Flood Risk Management

This comparative study explores how policy enables and constrains collaborative leadership in two very different policy fields in welfare and environmental domains. It adopts a policy studies lens to understand how over the long-term policy content structures the environment for collaborative working, leverages joint action, authorises sources of leadership and delineates roles and responsibilities. The authors argue that policy is not simply a context for collaborative leadership in the public domain, but rather a source of leadership itself as it sets direction for collaborative working, establishes the boundaries of power-sharing, and consequently limits what it is possible for actors to achieve. The paper highlights the value of research at the intersection of policy and public management studies, and urges public managers and policy-makers seeking to develop collaborative leadership to attend to the historical development and breadth of a policy field, rather than simply the latest policy announcements.