The centre of government (CoG) refers to the organisations and units that provide direct support to the head of government (president or prime minister) and perform certain key cross-cutting functions. These functions include the strategic management of the government’s priority goals (working with the relevant policy sectors to define targets and the strategies to achieve them, as well as aligning the budget with the priorities), coordinating the ministries and agencies that contribute to those goals, monitoring the implementation of priority programmes and removing obstacles when performance is lagging; managing the politics to enable the approval and implementation of those programmes, and communicating results to the public. The relevance of the CoG has increased in recent years due to a number of factors, such as the rise of multidimensional issues (e.g. competitiveness, inequality, crime) that require whole-of-government responses, the growing demand of citizens for better results in service delivery, and the need to ensure coherent policies in governments that have expanded their scope of activities and operate in a frantic 24/7 news cycle.