Governing Cross-Sector Collaboration

John Forrer, James (Jed) Kee, Eric Boyer

• Editorial: Jossey-Bass
• Año: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781118845929
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Business
• Categoría: Government & Business

A comprehensive guide to public sector collaboration with private and nonprofit organizations for better service delivery

Governing Cross-Sector Collaboration tackles the issues inherent in partnerships with nongovernmental actors for public service delivery, highlighting the choices available and the accompanying challenges and opportunities that arise. Based on research, interviews with public, private and nonprofit sector leaders, and considerable analysis of organizations involved in public-private-nonprofit collaborations, the book provides insight into cross-sector collaboration at the global, federal, state, and local levels. Through an examination of the primary modes of cross-sector collaboration, including collaborative contracting, partnerships, networks, and independent public services providers, the book presents a clear case for how public managers can assess the trade-offs and use these options to improve public service delivery. Nonprofit organizations, businesses, and third-party contractors are increasingly partnering with government to deliver public services. Recognizing the types of collaborative approaches, and their potential to solve public policy problems is quickly becoming a major task for public managers, with new methods and techniques constantly emerging. Governing Cross-Sector Collaboration provides specific examples and a framework for public managers to make strategic choices about how to engage private and nonprofit actors in delivering public goods and services while ensuring the public interest. The book provides effective methods for choosing, designing, governing, and evaluating networks, partnerships, and independent public-services providers, with in-depth discussion encompassing:

• Analysis and engagement of cross-sector organizations
• Fostering democratic accountability in the public interest
• Collaborative approaches (including contracts, networks and partnerships) and the issues associated with each type of arrangement
• Leadership and organizational learning in cross-sector collaboration

Included case studies illustrate effective application of the concepts and methods described, providing both practicing public and nonprofit managers and public policy/administration students with insight into these emerging strategic alliances. The first comprehensive guide to public governance collaborations, Governing Cross-Sector Collaboration is an important and timely contribution to the field of public management.

Part One
Choosing Cross-Sector Collaboration

Chapter One
Dimensions of Cross-Sector Collaboration

For public managers, cross-sector collaborations (CSCs) allow governments to leverage funds, expertise, and risk sharing with other sectors that can provide key ingredients to the successful delivery of public goods and services. For nonprofit managers, collaborations allow their organizations to better meet their stated mission and possibly expand that mission to related areas of interest. For private sector managers, collaboration promises increased profits, enhanced reputation, and expanded business opportunities. All sector managers can benefit from a better understanding of the nature of these collaborations and how they are successfully led, managed, and governed.

This chapter begins by examining a dilemma facing all public managers: how to respond to global challenges with a public sector that lacks the resources and support to accomplish its public responsibilities. It also addresses the collaborative imperative, a confluence of factors that are driving governments toward networks and partnerships. Second, the chapter defines cross-sector collaboration and provides a framework of types and uses of such collaboration as well as key issues for the public manager. Each type of collaboration is explored in more detail in later chapters.

THE DILEMMA FOR PUBLIC MANAGERS

Governments at all levels—federal, state, and local, in both the United States and internationally—face enormous societal, governmental, and economic challenges that are likely to become even more complex. These challenges pose a dilemma for public managers: the gap between what citizens expect government to do and the resources and support to our governments have never been broader. Government is underresourced, undervalued, and underappreciated at the very time when there are so many challenges for efficient and effective government policies and programs.

The lack of confidence in government, built up over years of accumulated frustration, means there is scarce political support for enhancing government agencies and their performance. And the lack of resources that agencies receive, coupled with the expanding demand and the need for government responses to current and emerging challenges, means perpetuating ineffective government performance, which in turn reinforces the lack of confidence in government.

Governments at all levels frequently lack the expertise, capacity, or funding needed to identify emerging trends and adopt effective policies and procedures. As a result, public managers may need to depart from current governmental hierarchical structures and engage actors outside government, in the private and nonprofit sectors, to address the challenges we highlight in this chapter and other critical emerging policy concerns. Cross-sector collaboration is not the answer to all of today’s challenges, but it can become part of the solution if managers understand when collaboration is an effective alternative to government-only solutions and when they recognize the underlying tensions that exist between competing values that are important for protecting the public interest.

THE CROSS-SECTOR COLLABORATION IMPERATIVE

Public managers confront a complicated and difficult governing environment in which they are expected to carry out their duties and responsibilities. Markets, politics, and societal expectations are rapidly changing. Some of the changes stem from forces outside government, some are a product of a public sector that often seems largely dysfunctional, and some are the result of new forms of organizations that are emerging and becoming actors on the public scene. Today’s problems are more challenging than ever before, and yet governmental efforts to address those challenges seem more problematic than at any other time in recent memory. Thus, the challenges facing public managers “require concerted action across multiple sectors” (Kettl 2006, 13). A number of factors appear to be accelerating this cross-sector imperative.

Societal Transformations

Transformations in society and societal expectations often make it difficult for public managers to address new challenges, especially from a single agency or governmental perspective. Today we live in “a densely interconnected system in which local decisions and actions may trigger global repercussions—and vice versa—and the fate of communities in one region is bound to choices by decision makers elsewhere” (O’Toole and Hanf 2002, 158). Many different things move on globalized networks—people, products, data, money, flora and fauna, news, images, voices—faster, more cheaply, and to more places than ever before (Rosenau 1990; Scholte 2005; Wolfe 2004). Globalization compels public managers to look outside their traditional jurisdictional boundaries in an attempt to understand and solve the problems they face.

Increased global competition also is transforming what used to be thought of as a seller’s market, where power was held by the producers of goods and services, to a buyer’s market, where consumers have more choices. This has led many businesses to increase their focus on customer-centered practices. As a result, consumers have increased expectations of receiving excellent customer service from the firms and stores where they shop. When we order clothes, books, and household items online, we expect to receive what we wanted, and if we are not satisfied with the product, we expect to return it, no questions asked. With this growing expectation, public services that follow a more bureaucratic (and monopolistic) culture look even less satisfactory than before.

Major Challenges Require New Thinking

The list of major challenges for government is as numerous as at any other point in our recent history, encompassing such issues as deteriorating infrastructure, out-of-control health care costs, and climate change. Climate change provides just one clear example of a need for collaboration. The earth’s temperature is rising. Although some may debate the impact human activity plays in the rising temperatures at the earth’s surface and in the atmosphere (e.g., a combustion of fossil fuels for power and transportation, deforestation, and expanding livestock herds), none can debate that greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have sharply risen in modern times (Pachauri and Reisinger 2008). Figure 1.1 provides a dramatic illustration of the problem.

Figure 1.1 Global Carbon Dioxide Emissions, 1850–2030

Source: Center for Climate and Energy Solutions (2014).

The consequences of climate change are alarming: greater melting of ice at the earth’s polar caps and rising sea levels that threaten cities and nations. Global ecosystems will be altered, threatening the health or even survival of flora and fauna. Weather patterns are changing, and hurricanes and other storms are likely to become stronger due to warmer ocean temperatures. Diseases could also migrate with rising temperatures, possibly spawning global pandemics. Rising temperatures could mean dramatic changes in crop yields and production, threatening food shortages (National Geographic 2011; US Environmental Protection Agency 2011). Public leaders and managers will have to find methods for involving all sectors in addressing the causes and consequences of climate change.

A Dysfunctional Public Sector Environment

Despite the obvious need for an effective public sector, public attitudes about government, caused in part by the dysfunctional behavior of public officials, and public fiscal constraints, make public-only solutions nearly impossible. Americans’ confidence in their national government is at historic lows, according to Gallup’s annual governance survey. A poll conducted in October 2013 found that 81 percent of Americans are dissatisfied with the way the country is being governed, equaling the highest share since Gallup first asked the question in 1972 (Gallup 2013). Fortunately, public satisfaction with state and local government is significantly higher than that of the federal government, with 74 percent expressing a good or fair level of confidence in local government and 65 percent in their state government (Gallup 2012).

Over the past twenty-five years at the federal level, the public has witnessed a retreat from building rational, bipartisan policy consensus. By almost all measures of partisan polarization, the divide between Democratic and Republican members of Congress has deeply widened over the past twenty-five years, reaching levels of partisan conflict not witnessed since the 1920s and 1930s. Even the appointment of officials to lead government agencies is a victim of such partisanship. Presidential appointees now take longer to get approval than ever before, and more positions remain unfilled for long periods of time. The very functionality of government agencies is weakened, and qualified executives simply pass on taking a government position, unwilling to face the partisan public scrutiny and politicking that is often the price to pay for public service.

The fiscal health of most US governments is not good. In 2012, government debt at all levels was at record levels and budget deficits were commonplace. While fiscal conditions improved somewhat in 2013, many state and local governments are at or near their borrowing limits. Standard & Poor’s announced in August 2011 that it had downgraded the US federal credit rating for the first time ever, dealing a symbolic blow to the reputation of the world’s economic superpower.

Hollowed-Out Government

More than twenty years ago Mark Goldstein (1992) observed how sustained budget cuts for US government agencies and the rollback of regulatory authority had severely reduced their capacity to govern. At the time he cited Department of Housing and Urban Development and Food and Drug Administration scandals, the savings and loan bailout, and the Hubble telescope failure as proof of the damaging legacy of severe government cutbacks. He used the term hollow government to indicate the lack of resources to carry out government’s responsibilities. Figure 1.2 compares the growth in national spending and US population to the growth of federal civilian employees since 1948. Despite the increase in spending and population, federal civilian employment has not changed significantly since the post–World War II era. While increased government productivity due to technology may ameliorate this issue somewhat, much of what government workers do has limited potential for productivity gains. Of course, looking just at federal employment hides the full extent of federal government...