Public administration, governance, and policy integration: towards a scholarship agenda of a neglected area

Policy integration has emerged as a crucial concept in governance and policy literature to address and mitigate complex problems, which is also applicable in the South African context. However, the majority of existing literature on policy integration focuses on government-centred approaches, such as organizational and institutional or actor-based approaches, with limited attention to governance approaches, also referred to as policy product (content) integration, despite its significance for policy effectiveness. South African scholarship exhibits a similar trend, with minimal studies focusing on policy integration, and even fewer on policy content. Methodologically, this paper adopts a conceptual approach, drawing upon policy design literature and focusing on emerging methods for studying policy content to derive potential insights for theoretical adaptation and application of policy integration. This study identifies and proposes change in the level of analysis to explore new aspects of policy integration by introducing a new theoretical lens of policy design content as the analytical locus. By extending the focus of policy design-as-content to the analysis of policy integration, this study suggests methods to examine policy content as an abstractable unit of analysis to map the interactions between policies and construct policy landscapes for describing, analysing, and diagnosing policy product integration and its impact on policy coordination, governance arrangements, and policy performance. This paper presents theoretical and practical implications for policy and governance, including the potential for policy makers to iteratively evaluate new policies to the existing policy landscape in the policy integration process for optimal integration, along with promising avenues for future research.