Twinning as an innovative practice in public administration

The purpose of this article is to assess twinning as an innovative experiment in interagency collaboration. We do this by describing the twinning of two Dutch governmental agencies, the Immigration and Naturalisation Service (IND) and the Social Insurance Bank (SVB). We focus on the rationale behind this partnership and the activities undertaken and evaluate the twinning using two different frameworks, a means-ends approach and a multiple process model. By doing so we not only assess whether the twinning of IND and SVB can be seen as an innovative experiment in interagency collaboration but also how such practices can best be evaluated.