Exploring the Role of Incentives and Identities in Management of Cross-sectoral Policy Governance

The need to create new job opportunities is hardly a controversial topic. Yet, public sector experiences alone or the use of hierarchical and coercive public policy is not enough for employment creation. Instead, new policy measures such as cross-sectoral governance involving both public sector and market actors appears to be a logical response to labor market complexity and employment dynamics. The effectiveness of such collaboration is nevertheless highly dependent on the will and engagement of private companies. In this paper I-discuss possible factors that may enable or hinder business partner involvement. For instance, an important actor explanation is private partners' focus on short-term economic gains and potential economic and political costs and benefits related to participation. With their pronounced stakeholder interests they may make less good collaborators - in the case they wish to get involved at all. Alternative explanations go beyond the realm of partners' rational intentions and explore norms, rules and regulations, at both the organisational and the partnership level, that may affect private companies' attitudes towards joint governance. For example, an entrepreneurial disposition to cross-sector collaboration or corporate social responsibility as part of a market actor's 'organisational logic' could increase its interest for private-public job creation. Metagovernance to facilitate partnerships should, therefore, focus on management style, and actor incentives and/or norm building processes. The paper discusses two empirical examples of partnerships for job creation at two policy levels. The first of them draws on cross-sector EQUAL partnerships at the EU level, while the other one, involves the example of the Swedish regional development and economic growth policy, which is based on collaboration between public agencies and business-sector actors. We could expect that the longstanding tradition of corporatism in Swedish policy making would create particularly favourable conditions for novel forms of cross-sectoral collaboration in employment creation. The multi-level EU Employment Strategy (EES) allocates structural funds to support large numbers of private-public cross-sectoral partnerships in the development and dissemination of new ways of delivering employment policies.