Antecedents of national policies coordination capacity in Iran: Exploring triads of policy coordination capacity

It is generally accepted that under the influence of new public management (NPM) principles, public sector reforms moved toward distributed governance, disaggregation and devolved government. In response to the increased fragmentation caused by NPM reform programs, many countries adopted coordination and integration strategies and a new generation of reforms emerged. NPM reforms made Iranian government more fragmented, albeit its fragmentation had other roots. In this paper we explored the antecedents of policy coordination capacity to rebuild and restrengthen policy coordination capacity. The findings stem from 17 in-depth interviews with national policy makers and public managers and in addition to analyzing a number of policy coordination documents which complemented data collection by data triangulation. The finding shows that the categories of policy coordination capacity is a triad consisting software, hardware and wetware of policy coordination capacity. Finally, a number of policy recommendation has been presented.