Boundaries are exciting, intriguing and turbulent places to inhabit. They are ‘like fault lines: they are the locus of volcanic activity. They allow movement, they release tension; they create new mountains; they shake existing structures’ (Wenger, 1998, p 254). Boundaries are often the sites of conflict, miscommunication and misunderstanding, resulting in a lack of coordination and duplication – they are too often perceived as barriers and protected by organisational, sectoral and professional walls. Alternatively, they can be the locus of transformation, collaboration, imagination, energy, innovation and creativity through the juxtapositioning of multiple communities of practice and interests. Boundary encounters are healthy for people and organisations – they avoid atrophy, groupthink and inbreeding, and offer new opportunities for learning, knowledge acquisition and windows on the world.

A preoccupation with understanding boundaries and managing their implications is critical in a UK public policy landscape that is defined by a number of particular characteristics. First, the type of policy issues and problems that are presented fall into the category of being ‘wicked’ – complex, tangled, lacking optimal solutions and multiply framed in terms of structure and meaning. These problems are not only persistent – social and health inequality, unemployment, an ageing population – but demand collaborative approaches to their management because they cross boundaries. However, some care is needed to avoid overstating the prevalence of ‘wicked issues’ because not all public problems and issues fall into this category. The Type 1 and Type 2 problems referred to by Chrislip and Larson (1994), which have relatively clear definitions and solutions, are best dealt with through conventional management and governance approaches predominantly by single organisations. There has been a tendency in the UK, fuelled by the mantra of ‘joined-up’ working, to apply collaborative approaches in an indiscriminate fashion to any type of problem. An important message for policy makers about to embark on collaboration is to decide exactly what business is best conducted through collaboration, and what business is best left in the hands of individual organisations.

Second, the public policy landscape is characterised by an institutional and governance architecture that is fragmented and multilevel, with frequent changes in the relationship between the state, the private sector and civil society. Devolution, decentralisation and localism are variously influencing the shape of local governance, often dependent on central government persuasion and direction.