The Intersectoral Cascade: a Case Study on Perceived Conflict in Implementing Child Development Systems

This article presents a case study on perceived conflict and its outcomes on implementing a system of programs and services for child development support. A multi-level collaboration model is used to deeply examine aspects of conflicts perceived by professionals responsible for implementing the system at the national, state, and local levels. This research adopted a single case approach with qualitative methods using semi-structured interviews and exploratory thematic analysis. A total of 29 professionals working at social development and health ministries, state departments, and one municipality participated in this study. The results show that professionals perceive one main unresolved conflict at each of the ecological levels. These conflicts are related to an informalized collaboration agreement between the Ministry of Social Development and the Ministry of Education, an interrupted resource flow from the national level to local level, and an unmanageable internal pressure at the state level. Furthermore, the compensatory strategies they use to deal with these conflicts are ineffective and lead to negative implementation outcomes. We suggest that future research should explore systemic conflict for the collaboration processes among the professionals to improve, thus increasing the quality of system implementation.