Strategic Governance in Public Agencies

Building on the threefold classification to strategic design, internal scanning and strategic governance (Johanson 2009) in public agencies, this paper elaborates further the strategic governance perspective. The pivotal concept is the social network. First, the classification of types of agencies provides contexts for elaboration of relational patterns. Second, the triad composed of three actors offers a detailed enough image of the roles within networks captured by the roles of mediator, tertius gaudens, and divide et impera. Within inter-organizational arena there are three fundamentally different institutional network environments for public agencies, that is, neutral, competitive, and regulative. The suitable network structure and the agency's role within it depends on the type of the agency and the institutional arena. In this study three roles for public agencies with their immediate social surrounding is identified; 1) the mediator 2) business partner, and 3) antitrust agent. The resulting scheme shows that the public agencies are attuned to both building and destruction of relationships within their networks