Coordination across organizational boundaries represents a perennial issue in public administration and organization research. It is one of the truisms in organizational theory that organizational boundaries affect organizational behavior and aggravate collaboration across organizations. Organizational boundaries reflect organizational specialization accounting for organizational norms, values and world views. From a public administration perspective, cross-organizational coordination is perceived an ongoing challenge as government departments are characterized by silo-orientation and inter-ministerial ignorance caused by institutional features such as the departmental principle, representing a rupture with the interdependence of policy problems and prompting selective perception. Recent research suggests that requests for cross-ministerial coordination become ever more pressing for numerous reasons, inter alia because the number of so-called wicked issues is said to increase. Inter-ministerial working groups to coordinate across departmental boundaries are typical central government responses to those requirements. However, coordination by means of inter-ministerial working groups is not only difficult because organizational boundaries are to be overcome but moreover evokes core questions of accountability. As inter-ministerial working groups are typically staffed at the working level, members are on the hand closely involved in their home hierarchy; but on the other hand they are mandated to find solutions for – often – tricky problems with their counterparts. Hence, how do members of inter-ministerial working groups cope with that inbuilt tension between hierarchically confined rooms of maneuver and negotiations among formally equal partners? By which mechanisms are they hold accountable in their home hierarchy and which factors predefine their room of maneuver? The proposed paper addresses this research questions by studying the inter-ministerial working group on adaptation policy in German federal government. This group has been established to develop an implementation plan for the National Adaptation Strategy and is staffed with officials from all ministries. The paper is based on interview data and document analysis.
