The increasingly hollow state: challenges and dilemmas for public administration

For over 20 years, a research programme has been conducted on service implementation networks that are connected to governments by a network of contracts. The networks themselves engage in a joint production of the service and thus collaboration is essential if these networks are to perform reasonably well. Most of the research in the programme has been in mental health. The degree of connectedness between the state and its agents has been used as a measure of how many degrees of separation there are between the source of taxpayer funds and the use of those funds. The more degrees of separation there are, the greater the degree of “hollowness”, and the more degrees of separation, the more difficult it is to govern and manage what is called a “hollow state”.