Collaborative Public Management: New Strategies for Local Governments

2. Managing in an Age of Collaboration

2 Managing in an Age of Collaboration This study is framed from many theoretical and applied management perspectives. As a result, the propositions that we test empirically reflect this vast and disparate literature stream. Researchers from many different academic disciplines and subfields—public administration and management, urban studies, political science, sociology, and business management, to name a few—have contributed observations of the complex governing environment of cities and the processes that cities and their managers experience while operating in such an environment. This chapter discusses these contributions and provides evidence from the case study cities to demonstrate the utility of investigating the ideas across many cases. Initially, we offer a definition of collaboration and make a case for the relevance of studying city-level collaboration within the context of economic development. The Dependent Variable Many different labels have been used to describe the interactive patterns of multiple organizational systems, and we employ ‘‘collaboration ’’ as our primary descriptor of managing across governments and organizations. In the public administration literature, the term ‘‘governance’’ is often used to describe a wide range of organization types that are linked together and engaged in public activities, enlarging (and changing) the domain of government. Governance connotes that more than public agencies are involved 20 Managing in an Age of Collaboration / 21 in the formulation and implementation of policy, which suggests ‘‘the declining relationship between jurisdiction and public management ’’ (Frederickson 1999, 702). Although Frederickson identifies governance as an emergent managerial phenomenon, others point to the increasing number of structural relationships between public and nonpublic organizations, and the increasingly complex mixes of public and private activities that must be incorporated into frameworks of understanding, regardless of their impact (Campbell and Peters 1988). It is within this latter framework that we look to current governance as involving multiple organizations and connections that are necessary to carry out public purposes. Collaboration occurs both in a vertical context, with emphasis on levels of government within the U.S. federal system, and in a horizontal context, where the players are local and represent multiple interests within the community. Although horizontal and vertical collaborative actions overlap in practice, we separate them analytically for purposes of description; all such activity is included when we use the term ‘‘collaborative management.’’ Horizontal actions emanate from the array of public and private interests that often must be locally mobilized. The horizontal environment of public policymaking and administration includes the interlocal resources held by nongovernmental organizations, private agencies, and area local governments. On a vertical plane, the city government operates within the policy and regulatory frameworks of state and federal governments, while gaining access to available resources. Much of the management in the vertical environment has been viewed historically as finding and operationalizing the proper balance between the national or regional purposes embodied in an intergovernmental program and the special needs of the city. A public manager may be involved in managing across governmental boundaries (vertical collaboration) within the context of one program or project, while simultaneously managing across organizational and sectoral boundaries (horizontal collaboration ) within the context of another program or project. Operating in each environment simultaneously can also occur within the context of the same program or project. It is often impossible in practice to distinguish where the boundaries lie between these phenomena. We define economic development broadly to encompass opportunities for linkages in many different policy domains, for 22 / COLLABORATIVE PUBLIC MANAGEMENT example, transportation, environment, commerce, and community development. Local economic development is the ideal empirical laboratory for observing policymaking and managerial collaboration because, as any astute mayor or city manager will attest, nearly everything a city does is considered as economic development . Cities certainly have many challenges in intergovernmental, interorganizational, and intersectoral collaboration in other policy areas. In human services, for example, from the 1970s movement to integrate services to welfare reform in the 1990s, interorganizational linkages and intergovernmental connections became a standard governance component for cities (Agranoff and Pattakos 1979). Rural (or nonmetropolitan) development depends heavily on state actions to support and mobilize communities (Agranoff and McGuire 2000), usually within collaborative networks of public and private actors (Radin et al. 1996). Similar linkages have also been found at this level in workforce development (Harrison and Weiss 1998) or job training (Jennings and Krane 1994). Examining collaboration in city-level economic development thus provides the opportunity to examine collaboration in overlapping policy domains. The more commerce-oriented activities of economic development...