Collaborating to Manage

A Primer for the Public Sector

Robert Agranoff

• Publisher: Georgetown University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781589019171
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Public Affairs & Administration
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Collaborating to Manage captures the basic ideas and approaches to public management in an era where government must partner with external organizations as well as other agencies to work together to solve difficult public problems. In this primer, Robert Agranoff examines current and emergent approaches and techniques in intergovernmental grants and regulation management, purchase-of-service contracting, networking, public/nonprofit partnerships and other lateral arrangements in the context of the changing public agency. As he steers the reader through various ways of coping with such organizational richness, Agranoff offers a deeper look at public management in an era of shared public program responsibility within governance.

Geared toward professionals working with the new bureaucracy and for students who will pursue careers in the public or non-profit sectors, Collaborating to Manage is a student-friendly book that contains many examples of real-world practices, lessons from successful cases, and summaries of key principles for collaborative public management.

CHAPTER 1
To Manage Is to Collaborate

THE AIM OF THIS BOOK is to help readers sort their way through the new and emerging ways of coping with the organizational richness that is a result of the cross-boundary government-to-governing changes of recent decades. It is designed to provide a guide to the core concepts regarding how to cope with the demands of this new and interesting and interactive world. The book should not be read as an operating manual but as a way to link thought to action.

Public visibility of the need to operationally coordinate public agencies and services has become prominent since the Hurricane Katrina disaster of 2005. Officials appearing on cable television news programs and in Internet blogs, as well as public administration pontificators, have called for a new emphasis on collaboration among federal, state, and local governments, and also with nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).

At the local level there are hundreds of interagency programs like Strive Together in the Cincinnati and northern Kentucky area. This program links public school superintendents and educators, university administrators, business leaders, and nonprofit and civil society executives into a collaborative devoted to using data-driven exchanges toward improvements in a series of priority outcomes ranging from kindergarten readiness to postsecondary enrollment and completion (www.strivetogether.org).

The Strive Together effort and disaster mitigation have a great deal of surface validity given the scattering of legal authority, funding streams, and delivery capability among disparate agencies and organizations charged with disaster relief and educational outcomes. This could also be the case for approaches to other pressing societal problems. Coordinated attacks on problems require collaborative management, a subject area that the field of public administration has not gone into very deeply. To be sure, many have called for a need to develop skills in bargaining and negotiation, or to learn how to manage with distributed leadership, or to engage in cross-disciplinary planning, but the advice givers rarely trenchantly consider the administrative domains of collaborative management.

What does collaborative management entail? It is an endeavor that has at least 101 definitions, and those who engage in it need to understand what it means. Although at one time collaboration referred to the cross-functional effort of persons working within agencies, it now also refers to those who cross the boundaries of organized entities working in dyadic, triadic, or networked relationships that are transactional in nature. Similarly, at one time management referred to the activity of strategy and direction given to single organizations, whereas today collaborative management refers to similar activities that reach across levels of government and across organizations. Thus, “collaborative management is a concept that describes the process of facilitating and operating in multiorganizational arrangements to solve problems that cannot be solved, or solved easily, by single organizations” (Agranoff and McGuire 2003, 4). As such, it involves purposive relationships that go beyond cooperation, that is, whereby actors work jointly in some helpful fashion. Collaboration is aimed at creating or discovering solutions within given sets of constraints, for example, knowledge, time, money, competition, and/or conventional wisdom (Emerson, Nabatchi, and Balogh 2012; Schrage 1995).

This increasingly important activity does, as mentioned, entail more than actions that include bargaining and negotiations, joint meetings, and formal partnerships or proposals for multiagency change. The field of public administration must go beyond these broad generalizations to break down and communicate the collaborative activities of managers. This book examines theory and practice in this increasingly important arena of collaborative public management. It is not only based on the author’s four-plus decades of experiencing and studying in these arenas but also reflects on the literature in this core area, where public and public-serving organizations work across their boundaries. It differs from the author’s previous work on human services integration (Agranoff and Pattakos 1979; Agranoff 1991), intergovernmental management (Agranoff 1986; Agranoff and McGuire 2003), and public network processes (Agranoff and McGuire 2001; Agranoff 2007). In this book the work of many researchers and practitioners is reflected, and thus it is designed to lay out the basics of collaborative management.

Collaboration matters a great deal in public management, inasmuch as so much public work is “outside” the bureaucracy, in “conductive” agencies—that is, public bureaucracies that gear their structures and operations to external as well as internal work, a major theme throughout this book. A conductive agency is one that engages in dismantling the boundaries of its structure and functions by connecting with a variety of external organizations and interests to strategically and operationally enhance its performance. Such agencies’ work is highly relational; that is, it lies both outside and inside their structures. For example, more and more public services are delivered by NGOs but under public-sector legal constraints and public agency supervision, monitoring, and auditing. As a result, the public management problem then becomes the problem of collaborative management. The knowledge base of collaborative management—that is, the practice–theory interaction—is captured in this volume in order to enhance study and practice.

Three theory-into-practice examples can cast some light on the collaboration knowledge base. First, following the pathbreaking lead of Anselm Strauss (1993, 24), Wagenaar observes that “actions are imbedded in interactions.” Wagenaar’s (2004, 648) study of interactive bureaucracy suggests that all administrative practice transactions (1) are situated, that is, take place in contexts that influence how they are understood and carried out; (2) involve knowing, or the application of knowledge in carrying out tasks; (3) are actions, the prime vehicle for negotiating in the world; and (4) entail interaction between parties, the central focus of work. Although these principles were applied to internal agency work by Wagenaar, they would apply equally to collaborative management, in that it is also always situated, involves the search for and application of knowledge, and requires both interaction and ultimately actions. Thus the practice of collaboration follows a path similar to that of work within hierarchies.

Second, in an interesting work on creative collaboration, Keith Sawyer (2007, 43–55) has found from research and practice that when people are engaged in collaborative endeavors, interpersonal conversation is critical because it leads to flow, a state of heightened consciousness, and flow leads to creativity. For Sawyer group flow, whereby persons work together at peak levels of activity, depends on ten conditions: (1) participants have a specific goal in mind, (2) members engage in close or deep listening, (3) participants concentrate deeply, (4) participants possess autonomy from their top management, (5) blended egos emerge as small ideas to build on big ones, (6) all participants play an equal role, (7) familiarity breeds productivity and decision making, (8) there is constant communication, (9) participants extend and build on other ideas, and (10) actors accept the possible risk of failure. These principles of practice, as applied to interorganizational collaboration, point to the kinds of issues that public managers need to think about as they embark on situated interactions designed to solve nettlesome problems.

Third, one important theoretical dimension of collaborative management is interoperability. William Jenkins of the US Government Accountability Office (GAO 2004, 2) uses the Katrina experience to illustrate how “interoperable communications capabilities” reflect “a function of effective incident command planning and operations structure that defines, for different circumstances and types of events, who is in charge and what types of information … would need to be communicated.” Jenkins’s GAO report stresses the immediate need for comprehensive planning, establishment of interoperable communications requirements, assessment of current responsibilities, and state governments’ operational planning and training requisites. It would appear that the concept of interoperability—reciprocally communicated planning and program operations—could well be one key from practice for unlocking the process of collaboration, which is inherently participatory at its implementation stage. To enhance practice these theoretical concepts of collaborative management require a more extensive look at details like those related to these three situations.

ORDINARY AND NETTLESOME PROBLEMS

The conceptually operational concerns illustrated above, however, are getting ahead of the story. Collaboration between public entities or between public entities and NGOs is a means to facilitate activities that are designed to solve public issues. In the fast-paced world of public-sector agents, there are problems that call for rather easy solutions and there are problems that appear to be so intractable that the path(s) to resolution are unknown, complicated, or need a multiagency approach, or most frequently are some combination of all three.

The easy public problems are straightforward. A rural road floods at a certain point every time it rains, and the township government obtains county money and expertise and builds a bridge. A relatively healthy, employed, low-income person suffers an injury and goes to the emergency room at the local public hospital and receives treatment. A medium-sized suburban community wants to showcase local gardens, so the city council appoints a volunteer garden tour committee. A financially pressed school board decides not to replace the retiring French teacher, so it sends the Spanish teacher to do summer graduate work in French. A small cluster of recent Somali immigrants who do not speak English have moved to town and the local social services agency finds a volunteer bilingual translator. A city government wants to build a convention center, but it fails to obtain either philanthropic or state grant funding and so it creates a “special convention district,” authorized under state law, and floats bonds to finance the project. Another city wants to begin a recycling program, so it amends its current contract with its garbage collection contractor for this new service. Many issues are very much like this.

Many other public problems, however, are considerably more complicated and require protracted efforts by several jurisdictions and organizations. Examples of these need to be explored in greater detail, such as the environmental and natural resources arena. The Elkhorn Mountain Range in Montana contains several types of ecosystems—mountain grasslands, various forest types, and agrarian zones—that involve a variety of landowners: the US Forest Service, the US Bureau of Land Management, and private families or individuals. Additionally, the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks has jurisdiction over wildlife in the entire region. Before the early 1990s this mix of landownership led to conflicting management practices (even in three ranger districts)—for example, poor land use, uncoordinated timber cutting, and unmanaged wildlife habitat protecting—with little coordination and almost nonexistent communication. Agencies often worked at cross purposes, under different mandates and toward different goals. In 1997 the various parties signed a memorandum of understanding to designate the entire region as a cooperative management area, which set in motion a process and structure for achieving interagency cooperation and substantive management goals (Wondolleck and Yaffee 2000, 87–88).

Another difficult problem is that of rural development. The federal government recognized that America’s rural (nonmetropolitan) and sparsely populated areas are being left behind because of small-scale, low-density populations and distance from urban centers, so it encouraged the establishment of state rural development councils, which comprise representatives from the federal government, state governments, local governments, the private sector, the nonprofit sector, and higher education. Some thirty-eight of these sister councils were ultimately organized and were supported by federal funds and the cooperative efforts of two essential agencies for rural development, the US Department of Agriculture’s rural development program and state government departments of economic development. The councils engaged in a number of collaborative activities to make an impact on rural development policy, promote statutory and regulatory relief, develop management improvement and information systems, foster demonstration projects, seek new funding sources, launch cooperative ventures, and organize leadership development (Radin et al. 1996, 155). The councils came about because no one agency or level of government had been charged with the responsibility for rural development; instead, it was fragmented among three or four federal departments and programs, two to five state agencies, the federal–state extension services at land-grant universities, substate planning districts, farm cooperative services and farm associations, state or county government associations, state and municipal associations, and state and local chambers of commerce.

The events surrounding Hurricane Katrina provide another nettlesome problem. It revealed a national emergency management system that was incapable of responding to the immediate needs of communities along the Gulf Coast and was unprepared to coordinate the massive relief effort required for recovery. Public criticism pointed to the lack of leadership among the three levels of government—Federal Emergency Management Agency, State of Louisiana, and City of New Orleans—to mount a disaster response and coordinate relief. In addition to the charge of a lack of command and control, which was heard often, the critics focused on a narrow set of functions: search and rescue, emergency medical services, temporary shelter and food, and restoring lifelines. Emergency management also includes hazard mitigation to prevent or lessen the impact of a disaster, disaster preparedness (emergency planning and training), disaster response (search and rescue), and disaster recovery (restoration of lifelines and basic services). Unlike military-type analogies, emergency management, when it is effective, relies less on command and control and instead on “a more dynamic and flexible network model that facilitates multiorganizational, intergovernmental and intersectional cooperation” (Waugh and Streib 2006, 131).

Transportation planning and financing at the local level also require coordination because they now take place in two primary venues. One is within city and county governments, where minor and arterial streets and roads that primarily affect given jurisdictions are organized, engineered, and built. The other venue, for most urbanized areas and their surrounding counties, is the metropolitan planning organization (MPO). The Des Moines area MPO, for example, is made up of elected and administrative officials and transportation professionals from thirteen cities and four counties, along with state highway department and federal transportation and mass transit officials. The MPO is charged under the US Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century to look at all transportation needs for the area, including bicycle, highway, paratransit, pedestrian, and public modes. It does this through its long-term Transportation Improvement Program, which incorporates short-term allocations of federal funds for local projects (Agranoff 2007, 75, 80).

In 1996 welfare reform included block grants to the states for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), primarily for young, single mothers. TANF places a five-year lifetime limit on the recipient of welfare benefits and requires most welfare recipients to work at least thirty hours per week. States have considerable discretion over program eligibility and administration, typically through local government and NGOs. Most important, for a state to reach its TANF goals of removing clients, it must help local administrative agencies deliver a set of support services that are funded under different federal titles, particularly Medicaid (health care services); food stamps (nutrition); child day care (social services block grant); education and training (several federal titles and state programs); pregnancy and parenting (US Public Health Service); housing (federal and state programs); employment services (federal–state employment service); and a host of possible case management, information and referral counseling, legal, substance abuse, and other services (Riccucci 2005, 15–17). Although few TANF clients require this full array of services, many need employment, education, health care, housing, child care, and nutrition services to remain employed and stay off welfare. This requires a concerted effort at interorganizational coordination on behalf of the client, with the client’s participation.

In 2001 the State of North Carolina completely revamped its mental health, substance abuse, and intellectual/developmental disabilities services by converting its county-level service delivery units into local management entities (LMEs) (initially thirty-three, with multicounty units). The LMEs do planning, provider network development, services and financial management, service monitoring, and evaluation of core services through a system of contracts for services with for-profit and nonprofit NGOs. The LMEs are also the gateways for admission to and discharge from state hospitals, because they perform screening, assessment and referral, emergency services, and consultation–prevention–education as they coordinate services (Lin 2007, 13–14). Recognizing that local public agencies are involved in both coordinated system development and the delivery of services, the state removed the LMEs’ direct service delivery function under the assumption that building local networks of providers and coordinating those services is a needed and different function from that of delivery, one on which the public sector needs to place greater emphasis.

Finally, the City of Cincinnati is representative of many larger cities that must work hard to maintain their economies in the face of a loss of manufacturing and service jobs to other US regions and overseas. The city coordinates these efforts through its Department of Economic Development. Most important, it maintains an active intergovernmental presence. It has formally adopted an intergovernmental economic development policy and pursues numerous discretionary grants and actively negotiates regulatory programs every year. It has broad and deep experience in the development areas, dating back to the Model Cities and War on Poverty programs of the 1960s. The city retains lobbyists in Columbus, the state capital, and in Washington. The city manager’s office is a focal point for daily communication with state offices (e.g., highways, economic development, and water finance authority), members of the state legislature, the congressional delegation, and federal offices (Department of Housing and Urban Development, Department of Commerce, and Department of Transportation). The city forges many interlocal partnerships, particularly with the area chamber of commerce; Downtown Cincinnati, Incorporated; Hamilton County, of which it is a part; and local developers and entrepreneurs (Agranoff and McGuire 2003, 10–11).

The concerns of land use management, rural development, emergency management, metropolitan transportation, welfare to work, mental disability services, and maintaining city economic infrastructures are all representative of the second category of difficult problems that are not solved by singular public action. They instead require concerted action by different levels of government and NGOs. Moreover, they require the actions of these different o...