The United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) agenda compels nations to face challenges, especially interministerial conflicts, in policy integration. This article seeks to understand whether and how conflict avoidance may hamper the implementation of the SDG agenda. Building on 56 interviews with policymakers and bureaucrats in Finland, Germany, and the Czech Republic, we explore how avoidance behaviours preclude the conflicts that are necessary for achieving integration. The findings suggest that avoided conflicts tend to be long‐standing issues related to environmental protection. We identify four factors that contribute to conflict avoidance: The issues for deliberation are too political, the actors know too little or too much about the issues, the deliberation is too abstract, and the bar for consensus is too high. These factors filter out many impactful conflicts for deliberation, which partly explains why integration regimes have not produced transformational changes.

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Symbolic commitment is commonly acknowledged in the literature to be important for sustainability governance. Academics express high hopes and expectations of symbolic commitment as a means to strengthen sustainability institutions. Policy makers and bureaucrats see it as being necessary in order to keep an issue on the agenda. However, little is known about how symbolic commitment contributes to institutional resilience. This study examines the rise and fall of national institutions for implementing sustainability agendas in Germany, Finland, and the UK in the context of fluctuating symbolic commitment. Interviews with 56 policy actors and documentary analysis uncovered the creative role of bureaucrats in securing symbolic commitment. The risks of relying on symbolic commitment can be reduced by considering the impact of economic austerity and the loss of institutional memory.

Policy integration as the central theme of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) agenda calls for more networks for linking actors and policies. The national coordinators of SDGs implementation have maintained a steering hierarchy that creatively engages the network of ministries to develop and implement the National Strategy on Sustainable Development. The integration literature presents a gap in understanding the internal fights of the bureaucrats behind the glossy policy documents. The study relied on 53 in-depth interviews and public documents from Finland, Germany and the Czech Republic to reveal how bureaucrats design institutions to balance the network, hierarchy and market features by maximising the strengths of each mode. The analysis aimed to reveal how ‘Networks Within Hierarchy’ facilitates policy integration. It was found that the network deliberated slowly, rationally and personally. The supporting hierarchy provided direction, steered processes and finalised decisions, and the competitive market supplied choices of policy idea, killed bad ideas, and retained specialisation. When the network entered into endless debate, the coordinators forced a consensus through the hierarchy. Bureaucrats competed with each other in proposing better arguments for their ideas, lifting the quality of the deliberation and the consensus.

The countries worldwide have adapted diverse governance approaches to the pandemic to suit their contexts. While the diversity of the country-specific governance responses has been widely discussed, the hybrids nature of those governance practices has been explored less. This study analyses the responses toward COVID-19 in South Korea as responsive dialogues of different modes of governance, i.e., consensus-based hierarchy, state-sponsored market, and principle-based network. This study aims to remind us that pandemic governance needs to enable organic and responsive processes for all actors in society. This conceptual discussion of the governance modes illustrates that the pandemic allowed the emergence of the hybrids of governance modes to cope better with the complex realities of the diverse sectors and actors in South Korea. The characteristic of the responses diverges from the conventional governance classification of or market-based. It is a responsive and evolving dialogue of different modes of governance. It would be productive to think beyond the oversimplified understandings of governance modes and embrace flexible and different hybrids of governance modes to be more responsive, effective, efficient, and equitable.