Governments have struggled with addressing problems that cross agency boundaries. Since 2012, the New Zealand Government has achieved significant success by holding groups of agencies collectively responsible for achieving intermediate outcome targets (the ‘Results Programme’). The Results Programme has been described as the most important change in how public services are delivered in New Zealand in 20 years. This article uses a mixed methods approach to triangulate 10 features of the Results Programme that appear to contribute to its success. Collaboration literature typically focuses on reducing barriers, often expressed in terms of transaction costs; in contrast, the successes of the Results Programme are explained here as methods for engineering a sense of joint goal commitment, that provides the sustained impetus to succeed despite the barriers encountered.
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