The introduction sets out how increasingly complex, cross-cutting policy challenges combined with constrained resources, rising public expectations and limited trust in government are placing significant new demands on centres of government (CoGs) to steer and co‑ordinate key government priorities. It examines how CoGs are evolving from largely administrative support bodies into strategic advisors responsible for aligning political priorities with implementation, managing interdependencies across ministries, and sustaining delivery over time. Drawing on evidence from six countries (Bulgaria, Estonia, Greece, B, Poland and Portugal), this chapter highlights three dimensions shaping effective delivery: efforts to reorganise government to achieve its main goals; prioritising a manageable set of commitments within planning, budget and monitoring routines; and ensuring the CoG remains agile and effective by strengthening its co‑ordination and analytical capabilities. Across these areas, a central theme is the importance of the political – administrative interface, as effective delivery depends on the CoG’s ability to act as a bridge between political direction and administrative execution, avoid overextension, and establish routines, tools and institutional arrangements that translate strategic intent into sustained results.
Building Centre of Government Capabilities to Steer and Deliver Complex Priorities
Abstract
The landscape in which governments must operate has become significantly more challenging. Public administrations are under greater strain than ever, driven by geopolitical tensions, restricted budgets, rapid technological change, including the growing but uneven adoption of tools such as artificial intelligence, and the cascading effects of environmental crises and conflicts. While the issues requiring government intervention are growing more interconnected and time‑sensitive, the structures and processes of government have not always kept up with the speed, co‑ordination, need to balance interdependencies, and clear strategic direction needed to address them effectively. The OECD’s 2026 Survey on Drivers of Trust in Public Institutions found public confidence is weakest where policy challenges are most cross-cutting and inter-generational. For example, only 34% of respondents believe government can adequately balance the interests of current and future generations (OECD, 2026[1]). In addition to scepticism among citizens that governments can address complex policy challenges, governments themselves face mounting external and internal barriers to delivery: slow growth, demographic shifts, and a layered accumulation of administrative complexity and governance processes within their own machineries.
Centres of Government (CoG) are well placed to support government in tackling these challenges. The CoG is formally defined as the body, or group of bodies, that advises and supports the highest level of the executive branch of government and council of ministers, leveraging its unique central positioning to be at the heart of steering holistic, co‑ordinated and coherent decision making across institutions and policy instruments (OECD, 2024[2]). Although the composition of CoGs in OECD countries varies, ranging from a single institution to several units linked to the head of the executive, the OECD has identified five common functions that describe the CoG’s essential roles in delivering on government priorities (Infographic 1.1).
Source: OECD (2024[3]), OECD Survey on Drivers of Trust in Public Institutions – 2024 Results: Building Trust in a Complex Policy Environment, https://doi.org/10.1787/9a20554b-en.
The operating environment for CoGs has also become faster and more politically fragmented, changing the nature of the work. Pandemics, energy and geopolitical crises, and rapid technological change have compressed the time available for policy deliberation, consultation and decision making. At the same time, more fragmented party systems responding to increased divisions within societies, coalition and minority governments, and electoral volatility have increased the demands placed on CoGs to manage intra-governmental relations. The issue is not only that CoGs are being asked to act faster or handle more priorities, but that those priorities require simultaneous action across several ministries, alignment between political commitments and resources, and sustained attention. This shifts the CoG from a role focusing on primarily supporting cabinet meetings towards a more active and strategic stewardship function: clarifying priorities, brokering trade‑offs between competing sectoral priorities, detecting blockages and keeping collective attention on outcomes that no single ministry can deliver alone.
In response, many CoGs have expanded their institutional architecture. Across the countries examined in this report, centres have added specialised capacity in strategic communications, strategic foresight, crisis and risk management, monitoring and data infrastructure, policy analysis, digital policy and delivery support; several have also created thematic units or dedicated teams for priorities that cut across ministerial portfolios. This is in addition to the core work the CoG has traditionally undertaken with, for example, co-ordinating the preparation of regulations and the use of impact assessments and/or ex post reviews. In many cases, these increased responsibilities have been a rational response to genuine capability gaps. But they have also risked overburdening the CoG, potentially setting out blurred mandates and unclear thresholds for when the centre should engage and when it should hand responsibility back. When mandates accumulate without a coherent rationale, the CoG can unintentionally add to fragmentation rather than reduce it. One of the questions this report addresses is, therefore, which common features across different structures, mandates, capabilities and tools enable CoGs to deliver effectively on cross-cutting priorities and avoid unintentionally creating obstacles to delivering on their key functions.
This report draws on findings from a project conducted by the OECD Secretariat with the support of the European Commission’s Technical Support Instrument and examines how CoGs in six participating countries are adapting their roles, practices, and tools to meet these demands. This report includes the analysis of those six countries in separate chapters for Bulgaria, Estonia, Greece, Ireland, Poland, and Portugal. They reflect the findings stemming from research conducted in the six countries as well as the results of peer-to-peer exchanges on the different challenges identified for each country.
The report builds on the OECD’s broader work on the functions of the centre of government outlined above. It also contributes to the OECD’s Government Unstuck agenda, which identifies opportunities for governments to improve their ability to deliver reforms that make a difference in citizens’ lives (OECD, forthcoming[4]). Each of the chapters focuses on those functions most directly connected to steering and delivering complex priorities: bridging political leadership and the public administration; stewarding strategic, cross-cutting and long-term priorities; guiding public administration reform and institutional modernisation; and ensuring that the centre itself functions as a coherent system (OECD, 2024[2]).
The report focuses in particular on three core areas where the CoG can effectively exercise its main functions and ensure that cross-cutting priorities can move from political commitment to sustained delivery: (1) Reorganising government and its machinery to deliver, (2) prioritising policies and planning for delivery, and (3) building capabilities for cross-government policy co‑ordination and policy development.
The first area relates to reorganising government to deliver. Cross-cutting priorities might lead to a mismatch between political ambition to deliver on core policy priorities and administrative structures that reflect a siloed approach to governing. Governments may respond by creating new ministries, merging portfolios, establishing central delivery units, creating co-ordination structures, or redesigning functions within the centre itself. These choices can help align machinery with priorities, but they also might carry costs: disrupted institutional memory, unclear mandates, duplicated functions, or instability in central planning and co‑ordination bodies. The report therefore examines how machinery-of-government changes and the internal architecture of the CoG can either strengthen or weaken the centre’s ability to act.
The second area focuses on prioritising policies and planning for delivery. CoGs are increasingly expected to support the political cadre in translating broad political programmes into a limited number of commitments that can be sequenced, financed, monitored and sustained. The challenge is not only to define priorities, but to avoid overloading the political and administrative agendas, to connect priorities to budget choices, and to ensure that data is used as a strategic asset for diagnosing delivery bottlenecks and enabling solutions to implementation barriers. The report examines how CoGs use cabinet-level agenda management, strategic planning frameworks, priority-monitoring systems and digital infrastructure to maintain focus on commitments long enough to enable effective delivery.
The third area focuses on capabilities for cross-government policy co‑ordination and development. The centre cannot deliver cross-cutting priorities by substituting itself for line ministries. Its effectiveness depends on whether it can convene ministries, clarify shared objectives, support data‑informed policy design, and create routines through which implementation problems are surfaced and addressed. The report examines the formal and informal networks, skills, digital platforms and data-governance arrangements through which CoGs seek to strengthen collective policy development and co‑ordination and follow-through across government to deliver on those most intractable “wicked” policy problems (OECD, 2017[5]).
The remainder of this chapter examines these dimensions in turn, drawing on the findings from the OECD countries that contributed to the project mentioned above. It draws on data collected through surveys undertaken with the six country representatives and peers in each of the in-country workshops. While this data is not comprehensive across OECD countries, it provides a snapshot of practices in the countries which participated in the project. The analysis is also informed by the 2023 survey on the Centre of Government with a broader set of OECD Member countries.
CoGs today often operate in organisational environments designed for a traditional set of sector-based demands. As the volume and complexity of cross-cutting priorities has grown, governments have responded by reshaping the institutional architecture through which they implement policy priorities: creating new ministries, transferring functions between departments, establishing or dissolving central planning bodies, and redrawing portfolios inside the CoG itself (Figure 1.1).
Note: n=8, Bulgaria, Estonia, Greece, Ireland, Latvia, Poland, Portugal, Slovak Republic.
Source: OECD, Agile and Dynamic Stewardship of Cross-Cutting Policies at the CoG, unpublished.
While changes are presented as instruments to improve agility and delivery, the lessons from the findings in the six countries in this report show that they can also produce the opposite. Restructuring can be costly, slow to mature, and at times undertaken without the analysis, frameworks, or change‑management routines that would make it work.
1.2.1. Designing machinery-of-government change to deliver policy outcomes
Machinery-of-government (MoG) changes can help governments align administrative structures with political priorities. They require careful preparation given that they affect reporting lines, corporate systems, budgets, institutional memory and working cultures. Their value depends on whether the institutional change solves a defined delivery problem (such as meeting fiscal objectives with a leaner government) at a proportionate level of disruption. This places the CoG in an important advisory position both before and after decisions to restructure have been taken, since the centre can help test the objective of the reform, assess transition costs, identify operational risks and compare restructuring with alternative institutional options.
The decision to reorganise government is most often a political one (Figure 1.2). The CoG’s role and functions as previously described are less about ‘deciding to reorganise’ and more about providing the data to help inform those decisions and once the decision is taken to help steer and guide the public administration into effectively implementing it. The CoG’s role ex ante requires it to provide the political cadre with all of the options and costs of changing the machinery of government and its possible alternatives in order to achieve the overall policy objective.
Note: n=6, Estonia, Greece, Poland, Portugal, Slovak Republic, United Kingdom.
Source: OECD, Machinery of Government changes, unpublished.
The CoG has a significant role to play in breaking down silos through organisational reform. When a priority lacks a clear institutional home, cuts across several ministries or carries high political salience, changes in the machinery can appear to offer clarity and send a political signal. Not surprisingly, as Figure 1.3 shows among the six countries, creating new entities, along with the transfer of functions, is the most common type of MoG change that surveyed officials have experienced. Yet the same objective may sometimes be achieved through existing cabinet committees, taskforces, ministers without portfolio, joint delivery arrangements or strengthened co‑ordination routines. Taking into consideration the transaction costs that these changes might entail is a necessary part of effective machinery of government reform.
Note: n=6, Estonia, Greece, Poland, Portugal, Slovak Republic, United Kingdom.
Source: OECD, Machinery of Government changes, unpublished.
Estonia illustrates the difference that prior analysis by the centre can make when governments reorganise ministerial responsibilities. In 2023, following parliamentary elections, the government reorganised parts of the ministerial structure to align administrative responsibilities with new political priorities, most visibly through the creation of a Climate Ministry. The changes affected around 700 of Estonia’s approximately 2500 civil servants and created operational costs across human resources, IT, financial management, document management and internal working routines, since Estonian ministries operate as separate employers with different administrative systems. The Government Office prepared several rounds of analysis on options and impacts before the Council of Ministers took its final decision. In contrast, in 2024, following a cabinet change, a second round of transfers included the relocation of the Digital Policy Department from the Ministry of Economic Affairs to the Ministry of Justice and some smaller units being moved for the second time in two years. The Government Office was not asked to prepare comparable analysis, objectives were less clearly communicated, and as outlined in Chapter 2 lower understanding within the civil service and weaker perceived legitimacy of the process.
The insight from this example is that the CoG’s contribution lies less in defending or opposing a decision to restructure than in ensuring that the decision is informed, sequenced and operationally feasible. A practical tool that emerged during the implementation of the project was the development of a hierarchy of institutional responses that tests the lowest level of intervention capable of achieving the objective. The OECD distinguishes between co‑operation, co‑ordination, collaboration and integration, with transaction costs and disruption rising as the arrangement becomes more intensive (Gerson, 2023[6]). This typology provides the centre with a way of asking whether a priority requires full integration through restructuring, or whether co‑ordination or collaboration would be sufficient. It also helps identify lighter options, including multiple ministers within one ministry, ministers without portfolio, government committees, thematic cabinet meetings, inter-ministerial taskforces, joint delivery teams or portfolio reshuffles that do not move administrative units.
Machinery-of-government changes benefit from a structured advisory role for the CoG. Examples include the United Kingdom’s Cabinet Office guidance which organises MoG changes around three phases: preparation, hitting the ground running, and a 100-day plan. Australia’s Public Service Change Framework provides enterprise‑wide tools supported by advisory services from a dedicated Centre of Excellence. In New South Wales, government agencies are expected to implement MoG changes consistent with the NSW MoG Changes Guide. The Guide provides NSW government agencies with guidance on implementing MoG changes and to support a more efficient transfer of employees and functions between agencies (Government of New South Wales, 2024[7]). These examples and the Estonia chapter below suggest that the CoG can help provide a set of practical steps that would otherwise be improvised through bilateral negotiations between affected institutions.
1.2.2. Managing the accumulation of mandates inside the CoG
CoGs are often being asked to take on new responsibilities in guiding and steering the delivery of government priorities, public administration reform, crisis response and stakeholder engagement, alongside their traditional role in supporting political and administrative decision making. These increased responsibilities can strengthen the centre’s ability to act on cross-cutting priorities, but they can also stretch its capacity, create layered portfolios or fragmented internal structures, and exacerbate co‑ordination challenges. The Survey on strategic decision making at the centre of government (Figure 1.4) highlighted these challenges with the most often cited being overlapping mandates and unclear responsibilities; prioritisation and trade‑offs; and operationalising long-term issues.
Note: n=26, Australia, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, Columbia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Estonia, Germany, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Korea, Latvia, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Portugal, Türkiye, Slovak Republic, Spain, Sweden, United States.
Source: OECD, Survey on strategic decision making at the centre of government, unpublished.
Decisions to bring an issue into the centre are inherently political. A head of government, prime minister or senior minister may decide that the centre must lead because the issue is politically salient, publicly sensitive, institutionally blocked or too important to leave to ordinary co‑ordination channels. The CoG’s role is not to make the decision to centralise policy priorities (that remains a political imperative). The CoG instead is expected to determine working modalities to fit the specific issue to be addressed: for example, whether the problem requires central ownership or only central convening structure, whether a credible lead ministry exists, what capacity the centre would need to effectively steer the issue, what will happen to existing priorities, and what conditions would allow responsibility to move elsewhere later.
The findings for the countries that participated in the research for this report, suggest that centres often face stronger pressure to take on issues than to define the limits of their involvement. CoG engagement is commonly triggered by political salience, the absence of a clear lead ministry or by issues cutting across several ministries with competing interests (Figure 1.5). These are valid reasons for central involvement. They do not, however, define the form or duration of that involvement. The findings from the survey of the six countries in this report point to the management risks that follow, including resource constraints at the centre, difficulty declining requests from ministers or heads of government, political pressure to act and the absence of clear exit or handover options.
Note: n=8, Bulgaria, Estonia, Greece, Ireland, Latvia, Poland, Portugal, Slovak Republic.
Source: OECD, Agile and Dynamic Stewardship of Cross-Cutting Policies at the CoG, unpublished.
Ireland illustrates how mandate accumulation can emerge in a capable CoG. Over the past decade, the Department of the Taoiseach (Prime Minister’s Department) has taken on responsibilities linked to Brexit, the COVID‑19 pandemic, housing, child poverty and well-being, support for Ukraine and others. These responsibilities reflected political salience, cross-sectoral scope and the need for central convening. The accumulated portfolio nevertheless creates a management problem for the centre itself. The analysis in Chapter 7 highlights that central stewardship needs a strategic discussion about the capabilities needed at the CoG, its approach to deliver on these priorities and plans for a legacy strategy including clear roles and responsibilities as part of a handover process.
In Ireland, the Child Poverty and Well-being Programme Office, established within the Department of the Taoiseach in 2023, provides an example of a mandate to co-ordinate from the centre. Child poverty had been addressed across several policy areas, such as social protection, children, education and housing, but without a single department positioned to lead a whole-of-government response. Moreover, the issue was a personal priority of the Taoiseach (the Prime Minister). The Office was set up to co-ordinate rather than implement the policy. It does not manage budget or programmes. In turn, it convenes departments, frames a shared narrative, brings a child-poverty lens into the budget process through cross-government budget reports, and leads a Cross-Government Network of senior officials that fills a gap in a system where co-ordination relies heavily on informal contact. Its profile was reinforced in September 2025 by a government target to reduce consistent child poverty to no more than 3% of children by 2030. The Office was not designed as a permanent unit, and the open question is the point at which its functions transfer to line departments once they can sustain the agenda without central support.
The country chapters below highlight questions that the CoG could ask itself before it takes on a new mandate. The CoG can reflect on whether central involvement will simplify decision making, address a known political or administrative deadlock, align with strategic goals, impact on existing priorities, require new resources or improve accountability for results. Before taking on a cross-cutting priority, the CoG can also clarify the policy objective, the political objective, the expected duration of its involvement, the resources required, the impact on existing priorities, the benefits for lines of accountability and the conditions for devolving responsibilities back to line ministries. It can also test whether a lower-intensity role would be sufficient, such as convening ministries, supporting a cabinet committee, establishing a senior officials’ group, strengthening monitoring or providing temporary analytical support. This might give political leaders a clearer view of the trade‑offs involved in placing another issue at the centre.
Global Affairs Canada offers an example of how countries can keep ownership for delivery of cross-cutting issues within line ministries. It operates under the shared leadership of three ministers covering foreign affairs, trade and international development. The centre steers and ensures implementation through departmental plans, prepared by ministries in response to the Prime Minister’s mandate letters. Another example is the creation of Canada’s Major Projects Office, a federal agency created in 2025 and designed to co-ordinate across federal departments and work with provinces, territories, Indigenous Peoples, and private-sector participants to fast-track the development of major infrastructure projects. By providing a single point of contact and leadership on major infrastructure projects referred to the office, the aim is to shorten the regulatory timelines and increase co-ordination and support from the government to complete projects faster (Government of Canada, 2026[8]).
Ideally, exit or legacy design should be treated as part of the original engagement decision. Countries participating in this report identified sufficient capacity and resources in the lead line ministry, a stable co‑ordination structure and political endorsement at cabinet level as important factors for a successful exit strategy. Handover, therefore, needs to be discussed when the centre first takes on the issue, even if the final transition remains contingent on political priorities. Estonia provides one example of a more deliberate transition path. Co‑ordination responsibilities were first located in the Government Office, supported by central convening arrangements, before the creation of the Climate Ministry provided a more permanent institutional home for the priority. This does not imply that every cross-cutting issue should become a ministry, but it shows that the centre can incubate a priority, build political and administrative alignment, and then transfer responsibility when the receiving institution has the mandate and capacity to sustain implementation.
1.2.3. Acting as a bridge between the political and administrative levels of government
Beyond decisions about ministerial structure and the scope of the centre’s mandate, governments face a third reform and design choice: how to ensure that the CoG builds an effective bridge between the political leadership and the civil service in helping to deliver on key priorities. Political decisions are mostly taken under compressed timelines and shifting electoral mandates; the administrative work of analysis, co‑ordination and implementation operates under longer horizons of statutory remit, norms and accumulated institutional knowledge. The CoG sits at the crossroads of the two systems, and the institutional choices about how they connect, which routines link them, at what stage technical input enters political decision making, how political and senior officials interact: these all determine whether the relationship works as a bridge or as a source of friction (OECD, 2024[2]). Countries participating in the research for this report highlight that there are a number of factors impacting on the CoG’s ability to deliver on political priorities. This is particularly the case during transitions between administrations (Figure 1.6 and Figure 1.7).
Note: n=7, Portugal, Bulgaria, Poland, Ireland, Greece, New Zealand, Estonia.
Source: OECD, The Centre of Government’s role as a bridge: Current practices and tools, unpublished.
Note: n=26, Australia, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, Columbia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Estonia, Germany, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Korea, Latvia, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Portugal, Türkiye, Slovak Republic, Spain, Sweden, United States.
Source: OECD, Survey on strategic decision making at the centre of government, unpublished.
As Figure 1.8 shows based on a survey undertaken with participating countries, the skills required to navigate this interface are unevenly developed on both sides. In line ministries, the most frequently identified important or very important gaps are the skills required to work across institutional silos: cross-sectoral collaboration and negotiation, strategic planning, data generation and an understanding of the machinery of government. At the political level, the gaps reported by the largest number of respondents in the survey as important or very important are an understanding of government processes and strategic prioritisation and focus, with managing cross-government co‑ordination, understanding delivery constraints, managing political-administrative boundaries appropriately and the ability to assess findings and policy options. The gaps differ on each side, but together they suggest that the political-administrative interface is weakened when political and civil service actors do not have a sufficiently shared understanding of political priorities, government processes, and delivery constraints.
Note: n=7, Portugal, Bulgaria, Poland, Ireland, Greece, New Zealand, Estonia.
Source: OECD, The Centre of Government’s role as a bridge: Current practices and tools, unpublished.
Formal frameworks governing the relationship exist in most of the six countries in this report with 57% stating that there is a formal legislative or regulatory framework and 14% a formal handbook or official guidance. This is also true in a number of OECD countries. For example, Denmark’s White Paper 1443/2004 sets out the relationship between civil servants and politically appointed advisers, limits each minister to a single special adviser focused on media and press relations, and preserves the civil service as the primary source of policy expertise. Reforms in 2024 to Australia’s Public Service Act 1999 introduced a new APS Value of stewardship developed through extensive consultation with Australian Public Service employees and other stakeholders and provides that ministers must not direct agency heads on individual employment matters (Australian Government, 2024[9]). In Finland, a 2004 reform created political State Secretaries attached to individual ministers to support political steering, while civil servant State Secretaries retain responsibility for administrative effectiveness and inter-ministerial co-ordination, an arrangement designed for ministries where several ministers from different parties share one administrative structure (Government of Finland, 2004[10]). Even with formal frameworks in place however, these may not systematically shape the relationship in practice. For those with existing frameworks, 60% of the countries surveyed for this report mentioned that their formal framework is only partially used (OECD, n.d.[11]).
The timing of technical input to support cabinet preparation is also perceived to be a common challenge. Among the same respondents, four out of seven note that the administrative or technical level is brought into major priority-setting at the mid-stage, after the political direction has been set but before final decisions are taken. Portugal’s Public Administration Planning and Foresight Services Network (REPLAN), which connects planning units across ministries to political decision-making processes, is designed to help shift this interface upstream by linking technical planning capacity more closely to earlier stages of policy preparation. Options that are developed in Chapter 3 for Portugal focus on better connecting the outputs of such networks for cabinet preparatory meetings, building a policy calendar around a limited number of cross-cutting priorities, and creating more regular cabinet-technical interactions through the networks themselves. Ireland and Finland’s structured political-technical committees, referenced during peer-to-peer exchanges, illustrate the same logic in a more institutionalised form.
The chapters below also illustrate how an effective relationship between the political and administrative levels depends on a shared understanding of their respective roles. 70% of the countries surveyed for this report noted that induction for incoming Ministers and political advisers consists of optional briefings without a standardised curriculum; only one country reports an institutionalised programme covering rules, roles and processes (OECD, n.d.[11]). Potential tools to strengthen this interface combine skills development with more deliberate organisational routines. They include clearer induction for incoming political leadership; targeted training in co‑ordination, communication, negotiation, data use and delivery for senior government staff; regular forums that bring political and senior administrative levels together often enough to build working relationships; and explicit protocols for engagement between political advisers and career officials. Moreover, as digital technologies and AI increasingly shape how information is generated and used across government, CoGs can strengthen their bridging and co‑ordination role by leveraging these tools to connect political and civil service perspectives, support more timely and coherent information flows, and enable better decision‑making informed by analysis and data at the interface between both levels (OECD, 2025[12]).
Translating a coalition agreement, an electoral programme or an international commitment into a body of initiatives that governments can effectively deliver is among the more demanding tasks that a government, and in particular a centre of government, is asked to perform. Political programmes and plans tend to accumulate, and the planning systems that surround them tend to expand faster than government’s capacity to budget and implement them (OECD, 2015[13]). Two questions sit at the centre of the work covered in this section. The first is how the CoG helps narrow a large agenda into a manageable set of priorities that line ministries and budgetary bodies can recognise, monitor, and act on. The second is how the chosen priorities are then embedded in the routines through which government takes decisions, allocates resources and reviews implementation.
1.3.1. Translating political programmes into a manageable set of priorities
The number of commitments that participating CoGs are asked to steer varies sharply across countries. The six countries in this report noted that the number of priorities ranged from fewer than 20 priorities to more than 500, with most falling in the 20‑100 range (Figure 1.9). The variation matters because the centre’s task is qualitatively different at each end of the distribution. A government working with a tightly drawn list of commitments can rely on cabinet preparation and existing line‑ministry planning to maintain focus, whereas a government working from several hundred initiatives requires the CoG to triage actively between commitments that need political steering, those that need only periodic monitoring and those that can be addressed within routine ministerial planning cycles.
Note: n=10, Bulgaria, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Ireland, Latvia, Poland, Portugal, Slovak Republic, United Kingdom.
Source: OECD, Strategic Prioritisation at the Centre of Government Survey, unpublished.
Many governments face the challenge of having too many priorities, strategies and initiatives, without a clear hierarchy among them. In the countries reviewed for this report, 70% mentioned that there was only a partial or unenforced alignment between strategic documents (OECD, n.d.[14]). Bulgaria provides one illustration of the proliferation of strategies, documenting an ecosystem of more than 200 strategic documents, mostly sectoral, without a clear hierarchy among them and with limited links to the budget. Although the new Methodology for Strategic Planning, adopted by the Council of Ministers in 2025, provides a clear hierarchy among national strategic documents, establishing hierarchical links between existing documents remains challenging. Poland, although structured differently, highlights similar pressure at the CoG. OECD analysis shows that in January 2025 the number of government initiatives was estimated at around 800, while the List of Legislative or Programme Works contained upwards of 700 projects and was being constantly updated. These examples illustrate how the centre of government can become quickly overwhelmed by both the sheer number of commitments from the electoral programmes of different parties as well as legislative commitments born out of line ministry initiatives.
Poland’s 2025 reforms illustrate one avenue from a broad agenda to a workable priority set. Following a wider government reshuffle and reorganisation in July 2025 and under the auspices of the new Minister for Supervision of the Implementation of Government Policy in the Chancellery, each minister was asked to identify three priority tasks for the second half of the government’s term, organised under four priority areas covering security, economic competitiveness, public administration and digital government. The list of policy priorities of members of the Council of Ministers was published on the Chancellery’s website, and 58 government priorities were adopted by the government in September 2025. The Polish case illustrates the benefit of having a deliberate compression of a much larger field of initiatives into a published, ministerially owned list backed by central oversight arrangements.
Other CoGs rely on different instruments to perform a similar streamlining function. Estonia’s Government Action Plan operationalises the coalition agreement; the Slovak Republic maintains an internal platform for monitoring its government Manifesto and a list of active strategic documents; and Canada uses publicly available mandate letters from the Prime Minister to line ministries specifying either what each minister was expected to deliver (under Prime Minister Trudeau) or setting out the Prime Ministerial priorities and requesting that line ministries set out how to deliver on them (under Prime Minister Carney). These instruments are not equivalent, and they reflect different constitutional traditions. They share a common function, however, which is to translate a political agenda into a smaller set of commitments, communicated in some instances to the public, with identifiable owners, time horizons and reporting expectations attached.
1.3.2. Embedding priorities in planning, budget and monitoring routines
Selected priorities only influence delivery once they enter the routines through which government takes decisions, allocates resources and reviews implementation. An analysis of monitoring long-term and cross-cutting commitments across the countries reviewed for this report shows that the connection between strategy and budget remains uneven (Figure 1.10). Three countries described long-term cross-cutting strategies as not connected to budget allocation, with strategic plans and budget processes operating in parallel. Three others reported that long-term objectives are referenced in budget documents but that allocations follow ministry-by-ministry logic, with no systematic way to track total spending against a strategic priority across government. Three reported a direct link, in which the CoG or the Ministry of Finance can identify spending against each long-term cross-cutting objective and adjust allocations against progress. Ireland reported a structural distinction between current and capital spending, with the National Development Plan providing a longer horizon for capital priorities. The point is not that one configuration is preferable than another, but that a strategy – budget link cannot be assumed to follow automatically once a strategic plan or framework has been created.
Note: n= 10, Portugal, Slovak Republic, Poland, Finland, Romania, Ireland, Bulgaria, Estonia, Greece, New Zealand.
Source: OECD, Survey: Stewardship and Monitoring of Long-Term and Cross-Cutting Commitments at the CoG, unpublished.
Across the country analyses the same institutional pattern emerges, even where specific instruments differ. Embedding priorities in delivery routines requires planning bodies that sit close enough to cabinet preparation and the budget calendar to be consulted before trade‑offs are settled and recognising that political ownership is key to keeping the architecture in place. Portugal offers an example in Chapter 3 of this report on how planning architectures can be designed to bridge strategy and budget. REPLAN brings together planning units across all ministerial portfolios and encompasses 26 services across the 17 ministerial areas. The multi-sectoral nature of this Network contributes to national planning exercises, including the preparation of the Grandes Opções - Portugal’s high-level multiannual planning document- and the Medium-Term National Budgetary-Structural Plan. This covers most of what is needed to align long-term priorities with budget choices: a central planning body, a network embedded in line ministries, a longer-term planning instrument and a medium-term budgetary framework.
Another interesting example takes place in the Netherlands, where spending reviews anchor priorities into the government’s work. The coalition agreement clearly defines expenditure ceilings and commits the incoming government to spending reviews over its four-year term. The Cabinet selects the policy areas for review and sets the terms of reference in the Budget Memorandum, a non-political working group co-ordinated by the Ministry of Finance conducts the analysis, and the findings and the Cabinet’s decisions on them are released publicly (OECD, 2023[15]).
1.3.3. Tackling long-term priorities in the current complex environment
Formulating long-term priorities is both one of the CoG’s main activities when it comes to setting the vision, priorities and strategic planning but is also perceived as one of its greatest challenges (Figure 1.11 and Figure 1.4).
Note: n=26, Australia, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, Columbia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Estonia, Germany, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Korea, Latvia, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Portugal, Türkiye, Slovak Republic, Spain, Sweden, United States.
Source: OECD, Survey on strategic decision making at the centre of government, unpublished.
The fragility of planning routines without sustained political backing is a recurring lesson from the country chapters when it comes to implementing long-term priorities, and Bulgaria illustrates this as it faced a significant challenge with numerous changes of government over a five-year period. Several reforms launched between 2022 and 2023 – the Strategic Planning Directorate within the Council of Ministers Administration (CoMA), the Development Council established in 2023, and the draft Strategic Planning Law – were intended to address strategic proliferation, build a hierarchy of strategies and link them more systematically to the budget. However, frequent changes at the political level resulted in these reforms being postponed or only partially implemented.
At the same time, there are ways in which CoGs can support long-term priorities while recognising the changing nature of the political landscape. In Bulgaria, they have set out a digital platform (Monitorstat Information System) which is intended to integrate strategic documents, indicators and budget data in a single platform. Other examples include embedding long-term priorities in routines as is the case in Finland with policies having an explicit intergenerational focus. In another example, long-term insights briefings are used to embed futures thinking in policy in New Zealand. Foresight can also serve a similar function. Ireland’s National Risk Assessment, for example, prepared by the Department of the Taoiseach in 2014, applies horizon scanning and trend analysis to emerging risks (OECD, 2018[16]).
Building capabilities at the centre of government including both technical and soft skills was a recurrent theme across the different peer-to-peer exchanges and research undertaken for this report. The CoG’s contribution to delivering policy priorities depends heavily on the analytical infrastructure it can draw on for cross-government policy work, the networks through which strategy and planning officials co‑ordinate across portfolios, and the practices through which findings and analysis on past reforms reach the next round of decisions in time to shape them.
1.4.1. Building capabilities to support cross-cutting policy development
Findings from the country chapters in this report show that CoGs appear to have a clear role in steering the development of cross-cutting policy priorities. According to OECD research undertaken for this report with participating countries, the main contribution of the CoG is to make collective policy work possible when responsibilities sit across several ministries and when different political priorities need to be reconciled (OECD, n.d.[17]). In approaching these tasks, the participating countries perceived themselves primarily as facilitators or brokers, ahead of more top-down roles such as directive change agents. This suggests that the centre’s policy role is to create the conditions for joint work: convening actors, structuring dialogue, bringing data into the process and helping ministries align around problems that no single institution can address alone.
Note: n=8, Bulgaria, Estonia, Greece, Ireland, Latvia, Poland, Portugal, Slovak Republic.
Source: OECD, Agile and Dynamic Stewardship of Cross-Cutting Policies at the CoG, unpublished.
The instruments reported by the six countries in this report confirm the importance of these capabilities. CoGs rely heavily on standing inter-ministerial working groups, cabinet committees, senior officials’ groups, dashboards and joint assessments (OECD, n.d.[17]). In addition, the CoG plays an important role in overseeing the quality of regulations. As stated in the OECD’s 2021 Recommendation on Regulatory Policy and Governance, “A standing body charged with regulatory oversight should be established close to the centre of government, to ensure that regulation serves whole of government policy” (OECD, 2012[18]). This includes making sure that regulations are coherent with overall government goals, of high legal quality and accompanied by sound economic analysis (Box 1.1).
The OECD Simplifying for Success Initiative, launched in April 2025, supports renewed government efforts to deliver simple, smart and streamlined regulations to help unlock prosperity. As part of this Initiative the OECD collected more than 50 case studies of regulatory simplification efforts, including initiatives led by CoG institutions. The example below illustrates how the centre of government can drive regulatory simplification for example by acting as a channel for business-driven proposals (as in Estonia).
Estonia: Council of Economic Growth and Efficiency
Established in March 2025 under the Government Office, the Council of Economic Growth and Efficiency brings together entrepreneurs and business leaders to identify excessive regulatory burdens, particularly in planning procedures, reporting obligations and state oversight and feed them into government decision-making. The Government Office manages intake, routes proposals to relevant ministries for feasibility assessment and forwards Council-approved measures to the Government for final approval. A public dashboard, updated daily, tracks each proposal's submitter, responsible minister, and status. Within months, over 500 proposals were submitted, with 122 approved by Government, 15 rejected and 15 already implemented. Managing this volume, particularly identifying duplicate submissions, has proven resource-intensive for the Government Office. Still, the model shows how a CoG body can build a structured, transparent channel for business-driven simplification.
Source: OECD (2025[19]), Simplifying for Success: Insights from OECD Surveys, https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/topics/policy-sub-issues/administrative-simplification/s4s-key-insights/OECD%20S4S%20Symposium%20Brief_Simplifying%20for%20success_Insights%20from%20OECD%20surveys.pdf.
Other tools as reported include the development of innovative hubs or labs. Latvia’s Innovation Lab on Procurement as a Horizontal Stress Test for Public Administration Performance is one example where a prototype was used by the centre to address horizontal issues in public administration. These tools improve co‑ordination and give the centre visibility over cross-cutting priorities, but the assessment also points to a more specific capability gap: the ability not only to co‑ordinate activity, but also to understand the nature and implications of cross-government policy challenges, and to build capabilities across ministries so that cross-cutting work does not depend only on the centre’s direct steering (OECD, 2024[3]).
This particular challenge helps explain why analytical capability and tools are perceived as the leading areas for investment at the centre. Strategic foresight, horizon scanning, scenario analysis and data generation are the most frequently identified critical needs. The CoG can play a key role in setting cross-government data governance standards and priorities; facilitating data sharing and interoperability across ministries; and ensuring that data is effectively embedded into decision-making routines at the political and administrative levels (OECD, 2019[20]) . As a result, there is a clear recognition of the need for stronger data infrastructure and shared monitoring systems in the six countries as a core enabler of government transformation rather than a purely technical or operational issue (Figure 1.13).
Note: n=8, Bulgaria, Estonia, Greece, Ireland, Latvia, Poland, Portugal, Slovak Republic.
Source: OECD, Agile and Dynamic Stewardship of Cross-Cutting Policies at the CoG, unpublished.
One example of cross-government analytical capacity is the use of policy advisory bodies which can be organised either at arm’s length or within the CoG. Ireland’s National Economic and Social Council, established in 1973, and chaired by the Department of the Taoiseach, advises the Taoiseach on strategic policy for sustainable economic, social and environmental development, bringing together representatives from business, trade unions, agriculture, community and environmental sectors alongside government officials and independent experts. Its work programme is set annually with input from the Department of the Taoiseach. In another example, Czechia’s Government Analytical Unit (VAU), established in 2023 within the Office of the Government, provides central analytical capacity to support policymaking informed by data and analysis across ministries (OECD/European Commission, 2025[21]).
Spain also illustrates the focus on policy advisory bodies within the CoG. The Cabinet of the Presidency of the government includes a Department of Public Policies, under the General Secretariat for National Policy, which supports the design and evaluation of executive policies and promotes co‑ordination across ministries to ensure coherence in government action. A separate Department of Strategic Foresight and Scientific Advice, reporting to the Deputy Director of the Cabinet, houses the National Office of Foresight and Strategy, which analyses long-term challenges and supports the design of innovative policies and long-term strategies, and the National Office of Scientific Advice, which works to embed data and findings in policy design and to build links between government and the research community.
Networks of planning or strategy officials based in line ministries provide a complementary route to cross-government analytical capacity. For the six countries in this report, almost half have a formal strategic planning network and 14% mention that the network functions on an informal or ad hoc basis (OECD, n.d.[11]). The main role cited by the six countries is to align ministerial plans with whole of government priorities. Portugal’s REPLAN provides an example as does the case from Bulgaria which created an informal network of experts on strategic planning in 2023 to support capacity-building and early-stage consultation. Formalising such networks can help to strengthen the effective focus on long-term priorities if they are accompanied, in the case of Bulgaria, by a clear technical advisory mandate, an annual work plan and a structured calendar of activities.
Senior officials’ groups have become a recurrent instrument for organising the technical work that prepares cabinet-level decisions on cross-cutting priorities. Ireland’s Senior Officials Groups, attached to each cabinet committee and chaired by a senior official from the Department of the Taoiseach, prepare cabinet committee agendas, align departmental positions, broker interdepartmental compromises and escalate unresolved issues to political attention, with a documented role in co‑ordinating cross-cutting priorities including child poverty and housing. Finland’s political-technical working groups, prepared by formal secretariats and including permanent senior officials from key central ministries, perform a comparable function. Standing inter-ministerial working groups, senior officials’ groups chaired by the CoG and political-level cabinet committees prepared by the CoG are the most frequently reported networking routines among the six countries and 2 peers providing data for this report. In both the Irish and Finnish examples, central preparation by a named central ministry gives these groups a defined working rhythm and an institutional locus for the analytical work that supports cabinet-level decisions.
1.4.2. Building capabilities to track progress in delivering on key reforms
The use of monitoring tools to track progress ex post remains uneven across participating CoGs. Among the 6 countries in this report 40% note that they are currently monitoring over 100 priorities within the centre. The main obstacles reported by the 6 countries in this report are both political and capacity related. Insufficient incentives or demand from the political level and capacity or resource constraints are the two most frequently cited challenges to sustaining assessment work at the centre of government (Figure 1.14). This suggests that the challenge is not only technical. Assessment needs depend also on political demand, timely commissioning and clear channels for ensuring findings are considered during the decision-making process on current and future reforms.
Note: n=8, Australia, Poland, Bulgaria, Portugal, Greece, Ireland, Estonia, Slovak Republic.
Source: OECD, Strengthening Impact Assessments of Reforms and Investments at the Centre of Government, unpublished.
OECD findings and research with the participating countries in this report show that capacity and timing are perceived as fundamental limits on the use of ex post data in decisions (Figure 1.15). Capacity constraints in line ministries are the most frequently cited limit, ahead of information arriving too late and capacity constraints within the CoG itself. Portugal describes assessment as embedded inconsistently or on an ad hoc basis, with timing and capacity limiting use; Greece reports no formal mechanisms in place for receiving impact findings relevant to decision makers, with capacity constraints in line ministries cited as the principal challenge.
Note: n=8, Australia, Poland, Bulgaria, Portugal, Greece, Ireland, Estonia, Slovak Republic.
Source: OECD, Strengthening Impact Assessments of Reforms and Investments at the Centre of Government, unpublished.
Country examples in this report highlight more formalised arrangements for ex post assessment, although these vary in scope and maturity. Ireland’s Department of the Taoiseach, for example, reports more than 50 reforms and more than 50 investments subject to ex post impact assessment in 2024-2025. Findings reach decision makers through formal cabinet reporting, integration into budget and performance review processes, informal briefings and public reporting. Australia’s Office of Impact Analysis, located within the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, provides another example. The Australian Government provides a structured central standard for assessing policy proposals through its Guide to Policy Impact Analysis is binding on policy proposals expected to change rights, powers or obligations and to have a significant community impact. It sets out seven structured questions covering problem definition, policy objectives, options analysis, consultation and evaluation, with mandatory documentation subject to assessment and public release (Australian Government, 2026[22]). Like other governance processes, the examples of Ireland and Australia suggest that assessment becomes useful to the CoG when it is embedded in the routines of government decision making.
1.4.3. Using digital infrastructure to build capabilities at the centre of government: dashboards, data systems and the use of AI
The increasing complexity of policymaking and sustained pressure to deliver policy results and impacts has led to CoGs taking a greater role in monitoring performance. In 2023, 19 out of 26 CoGs noted that monitoring whole of government performance was their top or significant priority function (Figure 1.16).
Note: n=26, Australia, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, Columbia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Estonia, Germany, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Korea, Latvia, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Portugal, Türkiye, Slovak Republic, Spain, Sweden, United States.
Source: OECD, Survey on strategic decision making at the centre of government, unpublished.
Most of the six centres of government examined in this report operate a centralised digital platform for tracking long-term cross-cutting priorities. The Bulgaria and Greek chapters include a focus on whether the data on these platforms shapes decisions in practice. Three conditions emerged from those discussions and from the country research. The first is integration with recurring decision-making settings, so that the platform feeds cabinet preparation and budget routines. The second is a reduction in the reporting burden on line ministries, achieved through one‑time data collection that serves multiple purposes. The third is a gradual shift from descriptive output reporting towards outcome assessment and risk-based analytics.
Countries still face substantive challenges connecting data with decision making. Bulgaria’s Monitorstat Information System illustrates the gap between an ambitious platform and its use. Launched in December 2019, the platform was designed as a centralised web-based system for monitoring European and national strategies, with the National Statistical Institute leading implementation in co‑operation with the Council of Ministers Administration. Until recently, however, the Monitorstat Information System functioned primarily as a repository: ministries were not required to submit performance data regularly, only a small share of the more than 200 strategic documents was uploaded or regularly updated, and most indicators were not systematically updated since 2022. The current upgrade to the platform is an important step forward, intended to align indicators, targets and reporting mechanisms with strategic priorities and international commitments.
Greece illustrates the further step from a working platform to one that is being extended toward AI-supported analytics. The General Secretariat for Co‑ordination monitors all reforms and investments centrally through MAZI, a single digital system through which the centre tracks implementation across the project lifespan. Chapter 6 below identifies two directions of further development. The first is decentralising parts of the monitoring workload: a version of the platform that would allow line ministries to enter their own milestone tracking is under development, which would free the General Secretariat for Co‑ordination to concentrate on cross-cutting issues and would give line ministries clearer ownership of their reform reporting. The second is the structured exploration of AI tools for monitoring, including taxonomies for cross-government policy classification and use cases for forecasting and risk assessment. The Greek case suggests that the centre’s monitoring function is increasingly an analytical and data‑engineering function reflecting the growing integration of digital technologies and AI into the core business of governing, as much as an oversight one.
A number of centres of government are reflecting on ways of strengthening the role of the centre to act once a priority is seen as off track (Figure 1.17). Poland’s 2025 architecture has been designed precisely to close the gap between data and decision-making. The Committee of the Council of Ministers for Supervision is responsible for establishing priority tasks in co‑operation with members of the Council of Ministers, setting milestones and deadlines, monitoring implementation and reporting risks to timely delivery to the Council of Ministers and the Prime Minister. The wider system includes ministerial leaders and co‑ordinators of individual government priorities, corresponding supervisors in the Department of Supervision, regular meetings held between the Minister for Supervision and members of government responsible for individual priorities, and an electronic inter-ministerial tracking system based on the platform used by the Ministry of Digital Affairs. The arrangement is recent, and the analysis in the country chapter does not yet allow assessment of its delivery impact. Its institutional logic is nevertheless instructive: it pairs the smaller priority list adopted in September 2025 with a routine that converts implementation reporting into recurring political conversations with ministers, supported by a shared digital tracker.
Note: n= 10, Portugal, Slovak Republic, Poland, Finland, Romania, Ireland, Bulgaria, Estonia, Greece, New Zealand.
Source: OECD, Survey: Stewardship and Monitoring of Long-Term and Cross-Cutting Commitments at the CoG, unpublished.
There are also questions about how digital infrastructure can support policy development. Estonia’s e‑Cabinet offers one peer reference: the system enables ministers and senior officials to access cabinet agenda items in real time, indicate positions in advance and adopt without debate items to which no objection has been raised. Latvia’s Unified Portal for the Development and Agreement of Draft Legal Acts is a complementary model covering the upstream phase, in which all line ministries submit draft legal acts to cabinet through a single digital portal that handles consultation, harmonisation, approval and publication, and is publicly accessible. The two systems together cover the policy development cycle from interministerial drafting through cabinet adoption, producing a continuous digital record that survives political transitions.
Country examples show that monitoring and broader digital infrastructure for the policy cycle acquire institutional value only when platforms are integrated with cabinet preparation and budget routines, and when data flow upward from ministries as part of normal reporting. In the absence of those conditions, investment in platform-building might contribute to transparency and accountability, but risks adding to the fragmentation of planning systems that several country chapters already describe as overcrowded. In addition, to fully realise this potential, these systems also require CoGs to develop capabilities to interpret and synthesise data across sources, translate technical outputs, including from AI, into actionable policy insights, and manage information flows that effectively connect political priorities with administrative implementation (OECD, 2025[12]).
As outlined at the beginning of this report, CoGs face numerous concurrent challenges: public trust in the government’s ability to deliver on the most complex issues remains fragile; the centre must act faster and on more fronts at once; and it is burdened with decades of accumulated mandates and processes. All of these have stretched CoG capabilities beyond their traditional role.
There is no single CoG model which will meet all these challenges and work across different types of administrations. However, across the six countries examined, recurring institutional choices appear to shape whether cross-cutting priorities translate into delivery, across very different constitutional and administrative traditions. Reorganising government to deliver requires governments to use restructuring selectively and with clear purpose, and to manage the accumulation of mandates inside the CoG with the same discipline applied to ministerial portfolios. Prioritising and planning to deliver depends on whether selected commitments enter the routines through which cabinet prepares decisions and the budget is set, and on whether political ownership is sustained long enough for those routines to take hold. Building capabilities for cross-cutting policy priorities depends on analytical infrastructure and networks that the CoG can convene rather than substitute for, and on tracking and digital systems integrated with cabinet preparation and the budget calendar. Importantly, it also relies on a set of soft-skills at the centre of government to effectively navigate the political-technical interface including the ability to provide fair and frank advice. Cutting across these three dimensions is the effectiveness of the political-administrative relationship. Clear political direction and analytical capacity at the CoG are each necessary, but neither delivers on complex cross-cutting challenges without routines that connect them. Delivering on cross-cutting priorities over the long term is, in addition to a matter of institutional design, a matter of investment in the people, training, technology and routines (both formal and informal) that hold the political-administrative relationship together.
The following chapters examine these dimensions taking into account the institutional context of each participating country. In the chapters in Part I, the role of the centre is examined in terms of reorganising government to deliver core policy priorities and the functions of the CoG as a bridge between the political and technical levels of government. Chapter two examines machinery-of-government changes in Estonia and the role of the Government Office (Prime Minister’s Office) in advising how to organise government to better deliver in multi-faceted policy areas. Chapter three looks at the role of the CoG in Portugal as a bridge between political and technical levels of government through the lens of PLANAPP and the REPLAN Network. The chapters in Part II, review the function of the CoG as a guide in helping governments to deliver on priorities set out in electoral mandates as well as long-term priorities. Chapter four examines the identification, communication and development of government priorities led by the Chancellery in Poland. Chapter five considers long-term strategic planning at the centre, with the implementation of long-term priorities in Bulgaria. The chapters in Part III focus on the CoG’s stewardship functions and its capabilities to support effective policy co-ordination and policy development. Chapter five focuses on monitoring policy implementation from the centre in Greece, including data management and the use of AI tools. Chapter six addresses the conditions under which the centre in Ireland takes on cross-cutting priorities, drawing on the Child Poverty and Well-being Programme Office at the Department of the Taoiseach as an example. Each chapter includes a set of practical considerations for the country concerned to support efforts to address challenges that were identified.
The online Annex of this report includes a number of practical toolboxes that resulted from OECD research and peer-to-peer exchanges during six workshops (October 2025-April 2026) attended by the six countries and peers from OECD countries (Australia, Canada, Finland, Romania, Slovenia, Spain, New Zealand and the United Kingdom). The main recommendations and key messages from the chapters and toolboxes are distilled in the ‘practitioner’s tips’ set out below.
The following sets out a number of key messages and practitioner tips for CoGs that emanate from the findings in the country chapters and toolboxes in the online Annex of this report. Not all of the tips below will be relevant to all countries given different administrative and legal traditions and cultures. They are nonetheless intended to support debate within and outside the CoG on how it can best meet today’s multifaceted and complex challenges.
1.6.1. Reorganising government to deliver
CoGs are uniquely positioned to ensure that machinery-of-government changes are purposeful, based on data and analysis, and proportionate to the delivery problem they aim to solve. The following tips highlight ways in which CoGs can fulfil their advisory and co-ordinating role by testing options, managing trade-offs, and guiding implementation so that organisational change strengthens rather than undermines policy delivery.
Set clear guidance for implementing machinery of government changes, in order to reduce the scope of case-by-case negotiations and simplify the process.
Clarify the roles of actors and basic processes for implementing machinery of government changes (recognising that these may need to be adapted to specific circumstances).
Develop manuals and support functions for change management to support leadership in designing, communicating, and implementing structural changes effectively.
Set out ways to evaluate the results of machinery of government changes in the medium term to ensure objectives are being met.
Develop a methodology and process to provide frank and fair advice to the political level on the benefits and costs of machinery of government changes over the short, medium and long term.
1.6.2. Planning and prioritisation
A recurring challenge across countries is translating broad political programmes into a manageable, coherent set of priorities that can be financed, monitored, and delivered over time. The CoG plays a critical role in this process, helping to reduce fragmentation, establish hierarchy among competing initiatives, and embed priorities into core decision-making routines such as cabinet and budgeting processes. For CoGs, the tips below provide a practical framework to connect strategy to implementation and sustain focus on what matters most.
Provide reviews to Cabinet of major cross-cutting proposals and set standards and guidance for priority identification processes to strengthen alignment with strategic priorities.
Consider developing a framework setting out a strategic vision for long-term priorities and how the CoG can manage these across political cycles.
Establish a co-ordination architecture or system that enables the integration of long-term priorities into routine policy design, planning, and budgeting processes.
Enable better co-ordination between the CoG and the Ministry of Finance, developing systems for linking financial allocations to long-term strategic objectives, and ensuring the budget process is aligned with priorities and ministerial action plans.
Strengthen the integration of foresight into strategic planning and policymaking at the CoG, including embedding foresight practices into the preparation of selected strategic documents.
Consider establishing a digital cabinet system to improve strategic co-ordination alongside the preparation and follow-up of cross-cutting initiatives.
1.6.3. Capabilities for policy co-ordination and development
Delivering cross-cutting priorities depends not only on structures and plans, but on the capabilities that allow governments to work across institutional boundaries. As outlined in the chapters below, CoGs increasingly act as facilitators and brokers, relying on analytical capacity, data systems, and networks to enable joined-up policy development and implementation. These practitioner’s tips therefore address a central question for CoGs: how to build and leverage system-wide capabilities rather than substitute for line ministries and to support collective problem-solving. Strengthening these capabilities is essential to ensure that co-ordination is sustained, informed by data and analysis, and focused on outcomes, particularly in complex and resource-constrained environments.
Introduce policy development tools and standards within the CoG to strengthen early-stage co-ordination of cross-ministerial initiatives
Devise a strategy on how the CoG can facilitate collaborative working practices on cross-cutting policies and ensure that informal or formal forums/networks at the senior civil service level have a mandate to drive forward these policies in a cohesive manner.
Convene a central analytical support unit to elevate capabilities for cross-cutting analysis within government including using policy labs as a testing ground for innovative approaches to shared challenges.
Build measurement and data requirements into cross-cutting programme delivery from the outset rather than retrospectively.
Ensure buy-in across government departments for shared monitoring systems and tools such as dashboards to enable decision-makers to assess key performance indicators.
Manage overextension risk within the CoG itself by developing structured transition strategies that strengthen rather than supplant departmental capacity.
Set out from the beginning and communicate to line ministries how the CoG can best add value across the policy system, distinguishing where it should lead, facilitate, or step back.
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