Collaborative Public Management

Beaumont Hagebak, a public administrator with what was then the US Public Health Service, offers a story about how, in the 1970s, the Texas Governor's Interagency Health and Human Resources Council attempted to cross-index 196 state programs that addressed human services. He notes that “the resulting matrix . . . revealed an unmanageable 1,100 overlapping areas of joint agency participation in program implementation. At the local level, federal human service funds eventually reach[ed] some 28,000 local units of government and an estimated 140,000 local non-governmental agencies directly involved in service delivery” (1979, p. 575). The need for collaborative management was evident even during that time. Indeed, interest in administrative cross-agency collaboration actually predates this example, existing as long ago as the 1930s in public administration texts. Leonard White's (1939) introductory text called for colocated administrative districts whose functions were interrelated and interdependent: “The coordination of districts by joint use of the same district, by building larger units from smaller, by consolidating the number of separate boundary lines, and by relating administrative districts to units of government would tend toward simplicity, the convenience of citizens, and better coordination of different phases of administration itself” (pp. 193–194).

The roots of modern collaborative management practice and theory can be found in the early policy implementation literature, particularly research studies that focus on the intergovernmental and interagency dynamics of delivering public goods and services. Before Pressman and Wildavsky (1973) exposed the complexity of joint action in their study of minority unemployment in Oakland, California, scholars showed how American federalism is highly collaborative in practice and has been so since the nineteenth century (Elazar, 1962). The grant-in-aid system in America has long been characterized by the presence of bargaining, cooperation, and mutual dependence. Early policy implementation studies were not just based in the US context. Collaborative structures used to implement manpower training policy in Germany and Sweden during the 1970s involved multiple power centers with reciprocal relationships, various suppliers of resources, overlapping and dynamic divisions of labor, information exchanges among actors, and the need for input from all actors (Hanf, Hjern, & Porter, 1978).

In a groundbreaking work that discusses how to collaborate, Barbara Gray (1989, p. 5) explains that “collaboration is a process through which parties who see different aspects of a problem can constructively explore their differences and search for solutions that go beyond their own limited vision of what is possible.” Contemporary examinations of collaborative management suggest that although collaboration may not be new to public administration, the incidence of such management has increased over the past few decades. Far from being episodic or occurring in just a few programs, collaboration in public administration is now as common as managing bureaucracies, and perhaps even more so in such areas as economic and community development, the environment, emergency management, and social and human services, including health care. Much of the recent empirical research has merely described collaboration in various settings, but there have been attempts to expose the black box of managing collaborative relationships with an aim toward improving their performance (Agranoff & McGuire, 2003; Emerson, Nabatchi, & Balogh, 2012; Thomson & Perry, 2006). Collaborative management is thus ubiquitous enough to warrant developing a knowledge base that can assist administrators in their efforts to plan and deliver public goods and services.

Such a knowledge base can be grounded in a consideration of the interorganizational environment. Government agencies, nonprofit organizations, and private firms each operate within an external environment comprising resources and other organizations. As policy problems become more complex, so too does the external environment of the organization. If the inner environment of an organization is designed such that it addresses the problems of the external environment, then that particular organization design will ostensibly have achieved its intended purpose. Accomplishing goals in complex systems is often a question of how well the inner environment adapts to the constraints and opportunities of the outer environment. Goal attainment is therefore a function of adapting the many and varied inner environments in a system to the outer environment rather than somehow making all inner environments identical (Simon, 1981).

The same logic can be applied to collaborative structures such as networks and partnerships. Effective collaborative managers recognize that they must establish the proper match between internal operations and external demands in order to reach optimal performance. Collaboration thus is both a product of its external environment and a method by which goals are achieved in the interorganizational field. Many different practices comprise the effective public administrator's collaborative repertoire, each based in providing the proper alignment with and response to the external environment. However, some prominent approaches to public administration focus only on the external nature of collaboration, leaving discussions of the black box largely untouched. For example, Salamon (2002) argues that a “new governance” has shifted “the focus of attention much more explicitly from the internal workings of public organizations to the networks of actors on which they increasingly depend” (p. 12). Other scholars state that “people working in government and administration will have to think of organization as an external, not internal activity” (Bogason & Toonen, 1998, p. 205). Although true to a point, one must know that collaborations are both externally directed and internally goal driven. The practices that drive effective collaborative management account for that operational linkage.

We discuss five collaborative management practices or categories of activities derived from a concern for the collaborative environment:

• Managing awareness, which involves determining whether collaboration is needed and who should be involved if collaboration is warranted.
• Managing the boundaries that often separate organizations and sectors. Such external boundaries must be navigated, spanned, or even eliminated as collaborations are formed.
• Managing constraints that are potentially damaging to internal operations, such as legal, political, and human resource limitations.
• Managing deliberations inside the collaboration.
• Managing external constituencies of collaboration, which essentially include any organization or manager affected by the collaboration's outcomes.

Far from being the ABCs of collaborative management, these practices or activities are necessary but not sufficient for a public administrator to effectively manage collaboration. These practices can be considered prescriptive in the sense that unsuccessful implementation of any of the five will jeopardize collaboration effectiveness. There is no blueprint for effective collaborative public management, but being attentive to these five practices will increase the probability of success.

Managing Awareness

The decision regarding whether to collaborate should not be taken lightly. Despite the prevalence of collaboration in the public sector, it should not be assumed to be the best solution for every context or issue. Collaboration can be the best way to work toward solving the intractable and wicked problems at hand, but the process can be difficult. Collaborative solutions can be slow to emerge, difficult to obtain, and costly to secure. Such collaborative costs have led some to argue that managers should not collaborate unless they have to do so. They recommend that “if there is a choice . . . avoid collaboration” (Huxham & Vangen, 2005, p. 80). However, many of the issues facing the public sector do not leave those involved with a choice. Whether a collaborative approach is mandated by higher levels of government or by the very scope of the issue needing to be addressed, collaboration may be the best, or the only, way to proceed. The question facing many public administrators, then, is how to tell if collaboration is truly the best approach.

The scope of the problem can often dictate the need for a collaborative problem-solving approach. The pressing issues facing public administrators are rarely neatly confined within the geographic jurisdiction, scope of responsibility, or the mission of a single organization or entity. For example, the issue of waterway restoration is not one for which a single agency or organization is entirely accountable. A city that is located on the shores of the waterway could work to address the issue alone. Progress could be made, but a complete solution could not be achieved by that city alone because the scope of the problem is too large and it is likely that the city lacks the resources, influence, and technical expertise to do it on its own. Instead, it would take the collaborative efforts of many, including the citizens who live within the waterway's watershed; individuals who use the waterway or its tributaries for recreation; nonprofit organizations whose missions focus on the waterway; businesses within the boundaries of the watershed; the cities, counties, and states that have jurisdiction over areas within the watershed; and federal agencies with responsibility over some aspect of the waterway or its watershed, such as the US Environmental Protection Agency. Each of these entities has a stake in the restoration of the waterway and together can make headway in the restoration project.

The need for resources also can drive the decision regarding whether to collaborate. To a large extent, resources determine what can be accomplished. Collaborative structures “function optimally when the right mix of resources is brought to the table” (Silvia, 2011, p. 70). This right mix includes not only financial resources but also other tangible resources such as personnel, equipment, tools, property, or other critical policymaking resources. Since organizations will generally not commit these resources to a cause unless they have a stake in the process or outcome, consideration must be given when deciding on whether and with whom to collaborate to the resources that will be needed and which potential collaborators have them.

Tangible assets are not the only resources that a collaborative arrangement needs. In order to be successful, a collaborative arrangement also needs intangible resources, such as prestige, political advantage, trust, and visibility. We see the influence of prestige all the time. Influential organizations or individuals are often sought out because their standing lends credibility and legitimacy to collaboration and what it is trying to achieve. Collaborating with prominent parties can also increase the visibility of the collaborative arrangement. Since public sector involvement in extraorganizational collaborative arrangements often requires the support of the constituency, working with collaborators who are highly visible or can facilitate the visibility of the collaboration can build support for its activities.

Another critical rationale for collaborating is to acquire knowledge-based resources, such as information, data, and technical expertise. An example is the EU response to the two environmental disasters in the late 1970s. In 1976, an industrial accident at a chemical plant in Sevesco, Italy, resulted in the release of a dioxin cloud into the atmosphere. Two years later, the Amoco Cadiz ran aground off the coast of France, resulting in an oil spill that polluted 320 kilometers of French coastline (see Boin, Ekengren, & Rhinard, 2013): “In reaction, the European Council decided that member states ‘must have very prompt access to information on the human and material resources which can be deployed for the control of such pollution’” (Boin et al., 2013, p. 23). As a result of seeing the need for greater collaboration among member states, the Civil Protection Mechanism was created under the premise “that large-scale natural disasters that overwhelm a member state require collaboration among assisting countries” (Boin et al., 2013, p. 23).

The exchange of knowledge is one of the most important reasons for and a resulting benefit of collaboration. Individual organizations and agencies generally have information related to their own area of interest. But their area of cognizance is often not inclusive of all aspects of the issue. As a result, each individual entity often lacks access to or the ability to process all of the information needed to plan or execute a proper course toward a solution. Therefore, the decision of an entity to collaborate and the awareness of when to do so must take into consideration the entity's informational and technical limitations and the understanding of which collaborators could fill that void.

Managing Boundaries

Organizations and sectors are presumed to have boundaries. That is, there are formal decision rules regarding who and what is included in an organization and within its purview. A public administrator knows who is a member of an organization and who is not. A nonprofit organization carries legal status that is different from government agencies. And the provision of governmental goods and services is not necessarily constrained by political, jurisdictional boundaries. Jurisdictions (e.g., cities, counties, states) are held accountable for the provision of a particular service, but problems such as unclean air, economic development, the lack of health care, and natural and man-made disasters do not conform to their boundaries. As Kettl (2006) argues, “For American public administration, the core issue is not so much about the existence of boundaries. Rather, what matters is which boundaries (what is being separated from what), how they are drawn (including how firm or permeable they are), and how to deal with the inevitable trade-offs (because boundaries always leave out important things as they seek to keep other things in)” (p. 11). He underscores the importance of ever changing boundaries related to mission, resources, capacity, responsibility, and accountability, which, when subjected to today's collaboration, vastly complicate public administration. Kettl concludes that the “boundaries that served us so well in the past can no longer solve either our administrative or political needs” (p. 17).

Public administrators, to be successful collaborators, must navigate across formal organizational and sectoral boundaries, which have become increasingly fuzzy and permeable. Understanding who is “in” and who is “out” organizationally allows administrators to make decisions regarding who should be included in collaboration. One important criterion for determining who becomes involved in collaboration may be that member agencies offer resources that other agencies lack. As a result, the effective public administrator engages in cross-disciplinary practice. Simply put, one must know something about the work of different agencies and program areas and be ready to respond with this knowledge. In a fashion similar to project or matrix management in organizational settings, the boundaries of multiple disciplines merge as collaborators work together on a product.

Effective public administrators are familiar with more than just what happens in their home organization. For example, the tasks of administrators engaged in joint project development at the city economic development level include much more than planning or financing. Administrators are also heavily involved in engineering studies, environmental protection, land use laws, and many other activities. The finance expert might work on legal changes and adjustments, the planner may request and propose an engineering change, the marketing person may become involved in planning a workforce issue, or the intergovernmental specialist may offer to write and negotiate a special provision on geological environmental specification. Acquiring and using knowledge from multiple disciplinary practices simultaneously can be critical to the success of a single project (Agranoff & McGuire, 1999).

Not all administrators are officially boundary spanners, a term used to describe key agents who manage within an interorganizational context, but most undertake similar activities. There are at least four general competencies for the “art of boundary spanning”: building sustainable relationships; managing through influencing and negotiation; managing complexity and interdependencies; and managing roles, accountabilities, and motivations (Williams, 2002, p. 114).

Russ Linden (2010) provides an example of this type of boundary management by discussing the Virginia Tobacco Communities Project (VTCP). The 1990s in the United States saw an increase in concern over the health impacts of tobacco use. Public health officials in Virginia also shared this concern, but Virginia was a tobacco state, and many of its residents relied on the tobacco industry for their livelihood. Funded by a grant from the Robert Woods Johnson Foundations, the VTCP was established in 1994. Although the participants at the initial VTCP meetings were tense, uncomfortable, and largely silent, a breakthrough happened in the third meeting when one of the farmers got angry with the position taken by the public health representative. What made the difference was that “remarkably, nobody got defensive” (p. 125). Instead, communication started. During this initial exchange, the farmers aired their grievances about how they were treated by the tobacco companies. Linden states that “this was a critical moment for two reasons. First, the outspoken farmer moved the group from tense separation to the start of authentic dialogue. Second, the health advocates learned that the two groups had a common enemy in the big tobacco companies. And that proved to be a golden opportunity” (pp. 125–126). As a result, participation in the VTCP increased; the parties, who formerly saw things as us versus them, began to work together, and they drafted recommendations for approval by the Virginia General Assembly. “Who would have believed that what began in 1994 at a tense meeting of farmers and health advocates would result in agreements contributing to legislation regulating tobacco and improving public health. Against significant odds, these two groups were able to find common ground” (pp. 128–129).

In essence, these seemingly irreconcilable sides to the tobacco debate were able to reach beyond their organizational and even ideological boundaries and “create and sustain mechanisms for participation for all stakeholders and finding solutions or processes that meet the needs of stakeholders across the board” (Weber & Khademian, 2008, p. 344), a necessary skill for today's public administrator.

Managing Constraints

Barriers and constraints are abundant in collaborative processes. Too often, collaborations develop policy solutions but then run into operational or legal barriers that prevent the next step. Collaborating administrators face challenges in converting solutions into policy, assessing internal effectiveness, surmounting the inevitable process blockages, and preventing mission drift. Given finite time and resources, the individual members of a collaborative must balance the demand of their home agency with the demands of the collective as there are costs associated with the collaborative process. These costs include the opportunity costs to the home agency since the collaborative manager must take time away from the home agency in order to collaborate, the time costs associated with protracted decision-making processes, and the cost of inaction due to the inability to reach an agreement (Agranoff, 2006). Countless person-hours are spent in task forces or work groups. Even when such constraints are overcome, it nevertheless comes at the expense of protracted relationship management.

Project success certainly depends on attention to process during collaboration. However, collaborative overprocessing is a major constraint to positive collaborative outcomes (McGuire & Agranoff, 2011). Collaboration can be limited by slow progress, painful experience, and lack of achievements. There can also be too much action or process in collaboration, which can lead to suboptimal collaborative outcomes. Climbing the hurdles of process is essential to achieving real results. Nevertheless, overprocessing can wear down collaborative efforts and can also make it difficult to cope with the power of key external agencies. Another process dimension is “partnership fatigue” and a lack of clarity about with whom one is collaborating and why (Huxham & Vangen, 2005, p. 72). Constant change can also lead to inertia as relationships between partners become increasingly fluid. Some public administrators continually face obstacles to success and remove them in a less-than-collaborative fashion in a sort of collaborative thuggery (Huxham & Vangen, 2005). The success that administrators have in working around these obstacles is a key to collaborative effectiveness.

The most difficult collaborative constraints are often aimed at getting large, established partners to change a long-standing way of operating that is deeply entrenched in standards, regulations, and procedures. Effective collaborative public administrators make decisions by exploration, discussion, and ultimately consensus. Consensus, the major mode of collaborative decision making, means letting everyone put their agenda on the table as partners unpack complex political, financial, technical, and regulatory issues. Reaching agreement through managing the collaborative process depends on (1) good timing and clear need, (2) strong stakeholder groups, (3) broad-based involvement, (4) commitment of high-level leaders, (5) political and governmental leadership support, (6) an open and credible process, (7) work at overcoming mistrust and skepticism, (8) achieving small interim successes, and (9) a shift over time to broader concerns (Chrislip & Larson, 1994).

In July 2010, the Ethiopian Public Private Consultative Forum (EPPCF) was established to facilitate the building of trust between the public and private sectors and provide “the means to more openly and fairly review policy, improve laws, and remove obstacles currently blocking better business in Ethiopia” (World Bank Group, 2014, p. 1). The World Bank Group “rated Ethiopia among the most expensive countries in which to register a business” (p. 1). Strong stakeholder groups, including the Ethiopian Chamber of Commerce and Sectorial Associations (ECCSA) and the Ethiopian Ministry of Trade and Industry, are active participants in the collaboration. The EPPCF's membership displays broad-based involvement in that interest groups at the “federal, state, and Woreda (local)[levels]” (Mihretu & Tolina, 2014, p. 2) are involved. The commitment of high-level leaders from all interested parties is evidenced by the fact that “the dialogue forums organized by the EPPCF secretariat are always co-chaired by the private sector and public sector” (p. 3). Interestingly, “the chairmanship from the government side depends on the specific agenda under consideration” (p. 3), and the Ethiopian prime minister personally chairs one of the yearly meetings, thus demonstrating political and governmental leadership support. In regard to building trust, Ato Eyeeus W. Zafu, president of the ECCSA, said, “[We] believe the Ethiopian Public-Private Consultative Forum [that is launched today] will develop a culture of mutual trust and cooperation between the government and the private sector. By developing shared objectives and fostering a process of collaboration and problem solving, [the EPPCF] signifies nothing short of a change in mindset” (World Bank Group, 2014, p. 2).

Although the EPPCF is relatively new, those who have studied the collaborative believe that it “has accomplished quite a lot particularly in terms of…building trust between the private and the public sector” (Mihretu & Tolina, 2014, p. 4). It has also achieved other successes in addition to building trust. In 2013, the Council of Ministers rejected “a draft customs procedures law primarily due to a concern that enough consultations have not been made with the private sector. In a country where mutual suspicion between the private sector and the public sector was a norm, this is a powerful development” (p. 4). The EPPCF plans to build on these early, significant successes and shift to broader concerns by increasing “the frequency and quality of dialogue sessions . . . Adding more vibrancy to the dialogue culture by engaging different organs of the government including the legislature is another focus area, [identifying] a clear road map for the sustainability of the EPPCF” (p. 5).

Overcoming collaborative obstacles is based on more than just reaching agreement; it is also about developing trust among stakeholders and generating political and social capital. When there is no history of prior ties, partners must be willing to take some risk to initiate the collaboration and aim for realistic goals. That is, the collaboration should first take small steps toward some modest level of achievement. Such success reinforces attitudes that the parties to the collaboration can be trusted, which leads to riskier undertakings. The lesson for the public administrator is that trust takes time to develop and that it grows as collaboration becomes successful. Collaboration may begin virtually “trust free,” but ultimately trust becomes a necessary component of future success.

Power and influence may be unequally distributed in collaboration (McGuire, 2011). The more power an agency (or the agency's representative) possesses, the more influence it has to determine the nature of the collaborative relationships. Actions intended to build consensus and manage relationships mask the potential for coercive behavior in collaboration. The more powerful members in the collaboration can shape activities through such means as controlling the agenda and even withholding needed policymaking resources. They also can resist collaboration because of their concerns for protecting their agencies' turf, whereby they defend against other members encroaching on their autonomy.

Managing Deliberations

One critical activity of collaborative management is to build relationships and interactions that result in achieving the collective purpose. Such activity is intended to facilitate interaction among partners, reduce complexity and uncertainty by promoting open and fluid information exchange, and increase communication linkages among partners to the collaboration. Collaboration is governed largely by the administrator's ability to facilitate collaboration through relational skills such as patience, empathy, honesty, and deference (Vangen & Huxham, 2003). Successful management thus achieves collaboration while minimizing and removing informational blockages to cooperation. Public administrators who openly share and exchange information and literally manage the communications infrastructure of the collaboration can facilitate interaction among collaborative partners.

Certain preconditions must be in place to facilitate collaborative decision making. First, the commitment of partners is essential. All parties to a collaboration commit a great deal of time for collective appraisal, design, concept building, and solidifying their relationships. Social time together reinforces this. Second, in many cases, most of the partners generally do not know one another professionally before entering into a collaborative relationship. The actors are thus brought together with a minimum of baggage and with the aim of lining up the key players. Third, a public administrator should exercise flexibility and let the project evolve rather than immediately imposing solutions. Task forces, committees, and design teams can be created; they operate more informally, but also should be consensus oriented in making decisions.

Fostering dialogue can promote understanding and mutual recognition between parties, foster trust and respect, and begin the work of relationship building—even as skeptics may voice suspicions of this as “just talk” (Forester, 2009). Moderating debate “can sharpen arguments, identify crucial or missing information, and clarify critical differences between parties—even as such sharp argument always risks escalating antagonisms and undermining relationships between the parties.” A critical perspective asks, “Are we here to foster a dialogue, to moderate a debate between perspectives, or are we here to act, to agree together upon a plan of action” (pp. 152–153)? Forester concludes that differences in priorities, interests, values, worldviews and perspectives, political positions, cultural identities, and more may need to be honored and worked through rather than ignored or swept under the table. Although much of collaborative success is dependent on the relationships between partners, the public administrator must take on new, proactive roles to ensure success. Public administrators and institutions have a unique role and responsibility in these processes. In addition to being a facilitator of other participants' interactions, it is clear that when collaboration succeeds and is held in high regard by the broader community, the administrator does not step back into a purely facilitative role. Rather, she provides essential leadership that guides the group and takes on the responsibility of ensuring the accountability of the process while still promoting collaborative interaction among multiple participants (Wondolleck & Yaffee, 2000).

Two days after Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Louisiana, the emergency management response to this disaster was in disarray. The city of New Orleans was flooded. The failed evacuation attempts resulted in many citizens being stranded in the city with no food, clean water, or shelter. There were reports of violence and looting. The governmental response at all levels was being criticized for failure to work together before and during the storm. Then Lieutenant General Russell Honoré, the officer who coordinated the US military's disaster response efforts in New Orleans, arrived. As the city mayor, Ray Nagin, said, Lt. Gen. Honoré was “one John Wayne dude…that can get some stuff done” (CNN, 2005). Honoré did not “get stuff done” alone. Instead, he realized that he needed to reach out to all parties involved and provide leadership during the crisis. He said that the “focus in the mission I had was to collaborate with all the partners and make it happen. People working together can get a lot done, and if you don't worry about who will get the credit, you can get even more done… If you can make your partner or your boss or your subordinate successful, you will have done something that is for the greater good. My job was to try to help the mayor in New Orleans be successful in his endeavors, try to help FEMA be successful, and try to help the governor be successful in what they were doing” (NPR, 2007). His collaborative leadership is widely regarded as one of the major factors in turning around the disaster response efforts. Although he could not have done it alone, they likely could not have done it without his leadership and ability to foster productive dialogue among the collaborative partners and bring people together to achieve a collective goal.

As Honoré showed, collaborations do not have the structural and operational stability of hierarchies. Although public administrators do not depend on organizational charts for assigning collaborative tasks, Thomson and Perry (2006) point out that collaboration does not imply the absence of an administrative structure. They suggest that it is critical for collaborative partners to clearly define member roles and responsibilities. Furthermore, members of the collaborative effort must see the benefits to working with others, that the time spent collaborating is not wasted time, and that the collaboration adds public value that would not be possible had the members acted individually. When this occurs, individual partners will be more willing to share a portion of their individual resources (e.g., funds, information) because they see that the result of using those resources provides tangible benefits for themselves.

Managing External Constituencies

In work that examined the factors that contribute to collaborative success, McGuire and Silvia (2009) found that developing stakeholder support for collaboration and its activities and mission were important predictors of the effectiveness of collaboration. Such support is established through open communication with stakeholders regarding what the collaboration is trying to accomplish and how it will benefit them. The question, however, is who “them” is. The identification of stakeholders can be complicated in collaboration since the external environment in which it operates is so complex.

As a function of their membership in a collaboration, each partner represents his or her own home organization and the constituencies that organization represents. Thus, a public administrator's stakeholders would include the governmental body that he or she works for as well as the citizens, companies, ad hoc groups, and nonprofit organizations that reside, work, or operate within the jurisdictional boundaries of that government body. Each collaborator must engender the support of the home organization, and that of his or her supervisor, in order to continue to be part of the collaborative. In building support for the collaboration, demonstrating value is critical. Each collaborator's supervisor must be able to see or be shown how continued involvement in the collaboration furthers the home organization's mission and goals. In the absence of seeing that value, resources will likely be withdrawn.

In addition, the home organization's constituencies must see the value of continued involvement in the collaborative process. In the case of collaborators representing public and nonprofit organizations, involvement of resources, including the collaborator's time and effort, represents the expenditure of tax or donation dollars. The taxpayers and donors do not want to see those funds misallocated. The difficulty with constituency representation is that the constituency is often heterogeneous. Thus, the collaborator must be sensitive to the competing demands of each group and attempt to show or convince them all of the collaboration's value.

The Utah Lake Commission is a collaborative effort of representatives from local and state agencies, including city officials from around Utah Lake, the central Utah Water Conservancy District, and various state agencies with the express purpose of rehabilitating Utah Lake. Their goals are to “1. Encourage and promote multiple uses of the lake, 2. Foster communication and coordination between Commission members, 3. Promote resource utilization and protection, 4. Maintain and develop recreation access, and 5. Monitor and promote responsible economic development” (Utah Lake Commission, 2014). Since tax dollars are used to support their efforts, the commission's members are cognizant of the need to build and maintain the support of their stakeholders, the citizens of their and their partners' jurisdictions. As a result, there is an annual Utah Lake Photo Contest, with the winner chosen by a professional panel as well as by a public vote at the annual Utah Lake Festival. The festival also provides attendees the opportunity to watch a sailboat regatta, view boat-making demonstrations, and take boat tours of the lake. They routinely publish articles in local newspapers and on their website touting their progress and success. And, perhaps most innovative, with the help of local educators, they have established a fourth-grade curriculum. The curriculum offers “ten lesson plans that teach core concepts in Mathematics, Language Arts, Science, and Social Studies using Utah Lake as an example.” The intended purpose is not only to help local students learn but also to “instill a greater understanding and appreciation for the lake” among the children and their parents (Utah Lake Commission, 2014). The aim of each of these outreach approaches is to build support for the lake and the commission through education and positive experiences. The commission realizes that this support is critical for its continued work and ability to achieve its goals.

If this were the entire scope of the collaborator's external environment, collaboration would be no more complicated than work accomplished with the home organization. However, in a collaborative environment, not only does each collaborative partner represent the home organization and its stakeholders, but they also inherit the stakeholders of every member of the collaboration by virtue of working with them. Assuming that each collaborator and the home organization they represent provide important resources and that each collaborator would cease to collaborate if they failed to show their home organization and its constituencies that the collaborative produced value, it behooves public administrators to demonstrate that value to the broad array of stakeholders so that each partner can continue to participate fully in collaboration.

Summary

It is not always the case, or perhaps rarely is the case, that collaborative management can be practiced easily. There are no simple recipes for managing effective collaborations. Public administrators can, however, rely on some basic principles and undertake the activities elucidated in this chapter to improve the chances for effectiveness. In a basic sense, collaborative public management involves establishing and facilitating interorganizational connections. The need for collaboration emanates from the inability of single organizations to deal with society's most difficult problems.

Partners in a collaboration work to achieve their individual organization's goals as well as a shared collective goal. The goal itself may be different across organizations involved in the collaboration. Two difficulties with assessing goal achievement and the overall effectiveness of collaboration can be carried over from a longstanding issue in public administration: how to measure and evaluate performance and what to do with that information. It is problematic to assess collaboration with the same output- or outcome-oriented aims as that of hierarchical organizations. In a public sector faced with demands from citizens for agencies to attain high performance and program effectiveness, collaboration cannot escape the critical issue of whether such activity is successful.

The goal achievement method of assessing performance is less applicable to collaborative processes because objectives are more autonomous, with no central authoritative coordinating actor (Klijn & Koppenjan, 2000). Moreover each of several collaborative partners may have differing objectives. In a sense, partners are prone to engage in a process of effective monitoring as opposed to formal program evaluation. As a result, collaborative effectiveness is partially based on the subjective judgment of those involved in the collaboration. So, while managing awareness, boundaries, constraints, deliberations, and external constituencies can be considered important practices of collaborative management, developing reliable measures of collaborative performance is perhaps the holy grail of public administration today.

Recent research on collaboration confirms its prevalence and relevance to the field of public administration in general, but practice still outpaces knowledge. There are several important issues to be addressed about effectively managing collaborations that are not covered in this chapter and for which researchers do not have clear remedies (McGuire, 2011). For example, public administrators must respond when collaboration hits a wall. What are the drags on collaborative operations and how can or do administrators overcome them? In addition, collaborations grow and learn, but we know very little about the role of the collaborative manager in instigating and guiding that learning process. Also, we have much to learn about developing the skills of the collaborative manager. What can be borrowed from traditional organization theorists, and what is not applicable or useful? Finally, there are clear political and legal limits on collaborative processes, but collaboration exists despite these limits. How do collaborations operate, sustain themselves, and sometimes succeed if they are so limited?

Collaborative public management is not the end all and be all of public administration. While reliance on collaborative arrangements for serving the public good has been increasing, it does not mean that such structures have replaced the traditional hierarchical organizations. The majority of a public administrator's time is still spent and work is still most often performed within the hierarchical structure of the manager's home agency or department. The collaborative manager must realize that the collaborative endeavors occur within the context of the authority relationships, accountability mechanisms, and the legal and perceived responsibility that are in place in government. Given finite time and resources, the individual members of the collaborative must balance the demand of their home agency with the demands of collaborating.

It is necessary to understand the five practices or categories of activity discussed in this chapter. Knowing why and when to collaborate, operating across organizational and sectoral boundaries, overcoming obstacles to collaboration, engendering purposeful interactions across collaborative partners, and recognizing the importance of gaining external support are critical to effective collaboration. The matrix of government agencies and nongovernmental organizations in the health management example earlier in the chapter has expanded in the twenty-first century in many different policy areas. As public administration has increasingly externalized through grants, contracts, partnerships, regulatory activity, and the like, collaboration among governments and between governments and nongovernmental organizations has moved to the core of practice.

Dwight Waldo (1948, p. 211) reminded public management scholars decades ago that an adequate “theory of organization” must maintain a perspective on how to “solve the problems of human cooperation.” Waldo's words are even more prescient if we substitute the word collaboration for cooperation. Public administrators are fast becoming collaborative managers. An adequate theory of public management must incorporate the collaborative nature of twenty-first-century governance.