From government strategies to strategic public management: an exploratory outlook on the pursuit of cross‐sectoral policy integration

This paper discusses how public administrations handle cross‐sectoral government strategies such as those on sustainable development (SD), and how this could (or should) change in the future. It puts SD strategies and their key objective of improving the cross‐sectoral integration of policies into the wider context of public administration in two respects. In a first step, the paper shows that SD strategies are a progressive step in the protracted debate on planning and strategic management in the public sector. In a second step, however, the paper explores the functioning of specialized public administrations as one explanation for the shortcomings of SD strategies in Europe. Consequently, the paper concludes that SD strategies should be developed further into a tool of strategic public management that helps to adapt administrative approaches to the integrative challenges of SD.