The Collaborative Public Manager: New Ideas for the Twenty-First Century

3. To Participate or Not to Participate? Incentives and Obstacles for Collaboration

Chapter 3 To Participate or Not to Participate? Incentives and Obstacles for Collaboration Rachel Fleishman Collaboration is more than a management buzzword. For many government agencies, collaboration has become the primary means of coping with modern problems, such as complexity in the policy process, turbulent environments, dispersion of resources and expertise, and the constant flow of new information. One highly integrated collaborative structure is the “interorganizational network”—a web of organizations that engage in collaborative activities, often bound together by relationships of mutual dependency. Interorganizational networks are becoming increasingly common in policy areas where resources are dispersed and jurisdictions are shared and overlapping, such as health services (Provan and Milward 1995), social services (Selden, Sowa, and Sandfort 2006; Graddy and Chen 2006), environmental policy (Wondelleck and Yaffee 2000), economic development (Agranoff and McGuire 2003a), and emergency management (Waugh and Streib 2006). Many government agencies in these policy areas are simply unable to accomplish their goals unilaterally, either because they do not exercise complete authority over the policy area or because they lack important resources. This research focuses on one task that faces the manager of an interorganizational network: how to motivate individual organizations to join and/or remain in the network. The purpose of this research is to better understand the motivations and obstacles facing organizations in their decision to join an interorganizational network, as well as participants’ decisions to maintain their chosen level of involvement. In a practical 32 Why Public Managers Collaborate sense, these insights are critical. For a collaborative manager, it is essential to understand what motivates different types of organizations to participate in order to “activate” and “mobilize” the right participants at the right time (Agranoff and McGuire 2001). On a more theoretical level, this research advances theories of network structure by observing which factors facilitate or impede the formation of network linkages. It has implications for the stability and longevity of network linkages, which is particularly important in light of evidence linking network stability to performance (Provan and Milward 1995). The context of this research is watershed management in the United States. It is expected, however, that the lessons may be applied to organizational networks in other countries and focused on other policy areas. Watershed management was chosen because of the diversity of organizational networks and associations working in this area and the rich body of scholarship that describes them (e.g., Wondelleck and Yaffee 2000; Koontz et al. 2004). The next section reviews theories of organizational participation in interorganizational networks, focusing on resource dependency. Research questions and the methodology follow. Finally, findings from the research are presented and discussed. ORGANIZATIONAL PARTICIPATION IN NETWORKS Scharpf (1978, 350) stated that “it is the task of interorganizational policy studies to identify . . . the empirical factors facilitating or impeding necessary interorganizational coordination in actual policy processes.” Unfortunately , not enough progress has been made since Scharf made this statement over thirty years ago. Although several different theories have been proposed to explain why organizations participate, there is no consensus on which motivations are most important and under what conditions some may be more salient than others. Resource Dependency and Exchange Resource dependency is probably the most well-developed theory of interorganizational partnership. The basic assumption is that individual organizations do not have all the resources they need to achieve their goals and rely on inputs from the environment, which itself consists of a “collection of interacting organizations, groups, and persons” (Van de Ven, Emmett, and Koening 1975, 19). Since every organization is in the same position of dependency, exchange relationships develop. Levine and White To Participate or Not to Participate? 33 (1961, 588) have defined organizational exchange as “any voluntary activity between two or more organizations which has consequences, actual or anticipated, for the realization of their respective goals or objectives.” More than just a way to acquire needed resources, interactions based on exchange are “a stabilizing force in the life space of organizations” (Alter and Hage 1993, 45). Exchange relationships stabilize interorganizational linkages by reducing uncertainty about the future provision of resources (e.g., Galaskiewicz 1985) and by maintaining consistent interaction patterns (Kickert, Klijn, and Koppenjan 1997b). Most scholars of interorganizational coordination agree that organizations prefer autonomy to dependence (e.g., Rogers and Whetten 1982). In times of scarce resources, however, organizations must balance autonomy with resource needs. To do this, organizations attempt to maximize their power in exchange relationships by avoiding dependence on other organizations and...