State Intragovernmental Activity and Alcohol and Other Drug Related Services: The Formal Policy Environment

A persist challenge to public health is how to efficiently and effectively deliver alcohol and other drug (AOD) related services given a multitude of funding streams, service providers, policy actors, and regulatory bodies. Complicating matters is the fact that many individuals with AOD-related problems have co-occurring risks or conditions that cut across issue areas and that may require collaborative efforts among various specialists and government entities to be successful. While previous research has examined gaps in resources and services at the community level, little attention has been paid to how federal and states policies may facilitate or impede collaboration among state administrative units.

This research, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Public Health Systems Research Initiative, is the first part of a multi-stage study examining collaborative public management. It involves analysis of federal laws and regulations from 1980 through the present as well as laws and regulations of select study states for the same period using an analytic framework developed by O'Toole and Montjoy (1984). The research identifies formal institutional arrangements that structure the environment in which alcohol and other-drug programs are implemented by systematically identifying the multiple state bureaucratic actors required to implement alcohol and other drug-related policies and the types of interdependence among these actors. Laws and regulations are summarized using descriptive statistics to show the types of inter-organizational relationships established through formal policies that may affect how states' public health systems respond to the AOD-related problems.