The Collaborative Public Manager

Today’s public managers not only have to function as leaders within their agencies, they must also establish and coordinate multi-organizational networks of other public agencies, private contractors, and the public. This important transformation has been the subject of an explosion of research in recent years.

The Collaborative Public Manager brings together original contributions by some of today’s top public management and public policy scholars who address cutting-edge issues that affect government managers worldwide. State-of-the-art empirical research reveals why and how public managers collaborate and how they motivate others to do the same. Examining tough issues such as organizational design and performance, resource sharing, and contracting, the contributors draw lessons from real-life situations as they provide tools to meet the challenges of managing conflict within interorganizational, interpersonal networks.

This book pushes scholars, students, and professionals to rethink what they know about collaborative public management—and to strive harder to achieve its full potential.

Table of Contents

1. Public Managers in Collaboration
Rosemary O'Leary, Beth Gazley, Michael McGuire, and Lisa Blomgren Bingham

Part I Why Public Managers Collaborate

2. Resource Sharing: How Resource Attributes Influence Sharing System Choices
Mary Tschirhart, Alejandro Amezcua, and Alison Anker

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

4. Partner Selection and the Effectiveness of Interorganizational Collaborations
Elizabeth A. Graddy and Bin Chen

5. The New Professionalism and Collaborative Activity in Local Emergency Management
Michael McGuire

6. Calming the Storms: Collaborative Public Management, Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and Disaster Response
Alisa Hicklin, Laurence J. O'Toole Jr., Kenneth J. Meier, and Scott E. Robinson

Part II How Public Managers Collaborate

7. Understanding the Collaborative Public Manager: Exploring Contracting Patterns and Performance for Service Delivery by State Administrative Agencies in 1998 and 2004
Jeffrey L. Brudney, Chung-Lae Cho, and Deil S. Wright

8. Collaboration and Relational Contracting
David M. Van Slyke

9. Mechanisms for Collaboration in Emergency Management: ICS, NIMS, and the Problem with Command and Control
William L. Waugh Jr.

10. Collaborative Public Management and Organizational Design: One-Stop Shopping Structures in Employment and Training Programs
Jay Eungha Ryu and Hal G. Rainey

Part III How and Why Public Managers Get Others to Collaborate

11. Collaborative Approaches to Public Organization Start-Ups
Robert Alexander and Rosemary O'Leary

12. Synthesizing Practice and Performance in the Field of Environmental Conflict Resolution
Kirk Emerson

13. A Public Administration Education for the Third-Party Governance Era: Reclaiming Leadership of the Field
Paul L. Posner

14. Surprising Findings, Paradoxes, and Thoughts on the Future of Collaborative Public Management Research
Rosemary O'Leary and Lisa Blomgren Bingham

References

Contributors

Index

Reviews

"An invaluable volume that both demonstrates the complexity of collaborative public management and offers a framework for analyzing its two faces, classical liberalism and civic republicanism . . . [The] book provides both a solid background and a basis for future analysis of collaborative public managment and should be a required reading in forward-looking MPA programs."—Governance

"Provides a broad look at what is one of the most important topics today in public management. The editors have assembled a group of top scholars and their students who offer their most recent thinking about why and how public managers collaborate across a broad range of critical issues, when it is appropriate and when it is not, and what some of the challenges are to collaborating successfully. [It] is a welcome addition to the burgeoning literature on the topic, with appeal to both scholars and public managers."—Keith Provan, McClelland Professor of Public Management, University of Arizona

"Collaborative management is the most important [issue] facing the field of public management and we need to know much more about how to manage collaboration effectively. The chapters in this book, written by many of the best scholars in public management, contribute a great deal to our knowledge of how this should be done."—H. Brinton Milward, Providence Service Corporation Chair in Public Management, University of Arizona

Contributors

Robert AlexanderAlejandro AmezcuaAlison AnkerLisa Blomgren BinghamJeffrey L. BrudneyBin ChenChung-Lae ChoKirk EmersonRachel FleishmanBeth GazleyElizabeth A. GraddyAlisa HicklinMichael McGuireKenneth J. MeierRosemary O'LearyLaurence J. O'Toole Jr.Paul L. PosnerHal G. RaineyScott E. RobinsonJay Eungha RyuMary TschirhartDavid M. Van SlykeWilliam L. Waugh Jr.Deil S. Wright

Supplemental Materials

Awards

About the Author

Rosemary O’Leary is Distinguished Professor of Public Administration and Maxwell School Advisory Board Endowed Chair at Syracuse University. She has received ten national research awards and eight teaching awards. She is codirector of the Collaborative Governance Initiative and codirector of the Program on the Analysis and Resolution of Conflicts.

Lisa Blomgren Bingham is Keller-Runden Professor of Public Service at Indiana University’s School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Bloomington. She has received the Association for Conflict Resolution’s Abner Award and the Rubin Theory-to-Practice Award from the International Association for Conflict Management and the Harvard Project on Negotiation.