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Wondolleck, J. M. & Yaffee, S. L.
Across the United States, diverse groups are turning away from confrontation and toward collaboration in an attempt to tackle some of our nation's most intractable environmental problems. Government agencies, community groups, businesses, and private individuals have begun working together to solve common problems, resolve conflicts, and develop forward-thinking strategies for moving in a more sustainable direction. Making Collaboration Work examines those promising efforts.
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Thomas, J. C.
For almost fifty years, scholars and practitioners have debated what the connections should be between public administration and the public. Does the public serve principally as citizen-owners, those to whom administrators are responsible? Are members of the public more appropriately viewed as the customers of government? Or, in an increasingly networked world, do they serve more as the partners of public administrators in the production of public services?
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Scholz, J. T. & Stiftel, B.
Water policy seems in perpetual crisis. Increasingly, conflicts extend beyond the statutory authority, competence, geographical jurisdictions, and political constituencies of highly specialized governing authorities. While other books address specific policy approaches or the application of adaptive management strategies to specific problems, this is the first book to focus more broadly on adaptive governance, or the evolution of new institutions that attempt to resolve conflicts among competing authorities.
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Putnam, R.
Why do some democratic governments succeed and others fail? In a book that has received attention from policymakers and civic activists in America and around the world, Robert Putnam and his collaborators offer empirical evidence for the importance of "civic community" in developing successful institutions. Their focus is on a unique experiment begun in 1970 when Italy created new governments for each of its regions.
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Provan, K. G. & Milward, H. B.
Although cooperative, interorganizational networks have become a common mechanism for delivery of public services, evaluating their effectiveness is extremely complex and has generally been neglected. To help resolve this problem, we discuss the evaluation of networks of community‐based, mostly publicly funded health, human service, and public welfare organizations. Consistent with pressures to perform effectively from a broad range of key stakeholders, we argue that networks must be evaluated at three levels of analysis: community, network, and organization/participant levels.
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Page, S.
Public managers collaborating across organizational lines face two fundamental dilemmas. The first is a problem of collective action-catalyzing joint work across different organizational missions, mind-sets, and bases of authority. The second is one of accountability, or ensuring that collaborators work together in ways that accord with the intent of the voters and public officials who authorize their joint efforts.
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O’Leary, R. & Gerard, C.
This report provides valuable insights into how federal senior executives view collaboration. Based on survey responses from over 300 members of the federal Senior Executive Service, O’Leary and Gerard found that nearly all those surveyed report using collaboration as a management strategy. Survey respondents clearly recognize that the job of senior executives today involves collaboration within their agency, their department, and the federal government, as well as with key external partners and stakeholders.
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McGuire, M.
Collaborative public management research is flourishing. A great deal of attention is being paid to the process and impact of collaboration in the public sector, and the results are promising. This article reviews the literature on collaborative public management by synthesizing what we know from recent research and what we’ve known for quite some time. It addresses the prevalence of collaboration (both recently and historically), the components of emerging collaborative structures, the types of skills that are unique to collaborative management, and the effects of collaboration.
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Meadows, Donella
Meadows' newly released manuscript, Thinking in Systems, is a concise and crucial book offering insight for problem solving on scales ranging from the personal to the global. Edited by the Sustainability Institute's Diana Wright, this essential primer brings systems thinking out of the realm of computers and equations and into the tangible world, showing readers how to develop the systems-thinking skills that thought leaders across the globe consider critical for 21st-century life.
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Margerum, R. D.
In Beyond Consensus, Richard Margerum examines the full range of collaborative enterprises in natural resource management, urban planning, and environmental policy. He explains the pros and cons of collaborative approaches, develops methods to test their effectiveness, and identifies ways to improve their implementation and results. Drawing on extensive case studies of collabo-rations in the United States and Australia, Margerum shows that collaboration is not just about developing a strategy but also about creating and sustaining arrangements that can support collaborative implementation.
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Leach, W. D.
This article provides a framework for assessing the democratic merits of collaborative public management in terms of seven normative ideals: inclusiveness, representativeness, impartiality, transparency, deliberativeness, lawfulness, and empowerment. The framework is used to analyze a random sample of 76 watershed partnerships in California and Washington State. The study reveals the exclusionary nature of some partnerships and suggests that critical stakeholders are missing from many partnerships. However, representation was generally balanced.
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Koliba, C.
If we are to assess the performance of networks within a public administration and policy context, we must regard them as tangible, observable structures comprised of nodes (or agents) and ties that formally or informally, tightly or loosely, couple two or more nodes together. The kind of “network logic” that accompanies the study of networks bears a significant impact on our understandings of network performance.
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Innes, Judith E. & Booher, D. E.
Analyzing emerging practices of collaboration in planning and public policy to overcome the challenges complexity, fragmentation and uncertainty, the authors present a new theory of collaborative rationality, to help make sense of the new practices. They enquire in detail into how collaborative rationality works, the theories that inform it, and the potential and pitfalls for democracy in the twenty-first century.
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Gerlak, A. K., Heikkila, T. & Lubell, M.
This article analyzes the promises and potential pitfalls of collaborative governance. It first summarizes the origins and evolution of collaborative governance and then compares the claims of the proponents and opponents. It then reviews what is known and what is still uncertain from the growing body of empirical research studying collaborative environmental governance. The conclusion speculates on the future of collaborative governance for both research and practice.
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Fountain, J.
Federal agencies and academics have long discussed the importance of cross-agency collaboration. But recent changes in law and advances in technology have led to a new environment that makes cross-agency management far more achievable. The GPRA Modernization Act of 2010 requires the development of government-wide priority goals and greater coordination among agencies. This report provides useful insights into how the government can proceed in creating effective cross-agency collaborations that can improve outcomes significantly.
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Emerson, K., Nabatchi, T. & Balogh, S.
Collaborative governance draws from diverse realms of practice and research in public administration. This article synthesizes and extends a suite of conceptual frameworks, research findings, and practice-based knowledge into an integrative framework for collaborative governance. The framework specifies a set of nested dimensions that encompass a larger system context, a collaborative governance regime, and its internal collaborative dynamics and actions that can generate impacts and adaptations across the systems.
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Emerson, K. & Nabatchi, T.
Whether the goal is building a local park or developing disaster response models, collaborative governance is changing the way public agencies at the local, regional, and national levels are working with each other and with key partners in the nonprofit and private sectors. While the academic literature has spawned numerous case studies and context- or policy-specific models for collaboration, the growth of these innovative collaborative governance systems has outpaced the scholarship needed to define it.
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Crosby, B. C. & Bryson, J. M.
In the United States and elsewhere, collaboration among government agencies, businesses, and nonprofits to handle community or societal needs has become commonplace. Unfortunately, at the present time the use of cross-sector collaborations is proceeding at a faster pace than our research ability to understand what contributes to the formation of cross-sector collaboration and to its effective or ineffective operation.
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Connelly, D. R., Zhang, J. & Faerman, S.
In the past two decades, there has been an increasing use of intra-and interorganizational collaborations across organizations in the public, for-profit, and nonprofit sectors.
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Booher, D. E.
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Bingham, L. B. & O’Leary, R.
The world of public management is changing dramatically, fueled by technological innovations such as the Internet, globalism that permits us to outsource functions anywhere in the world, new ideas from network theory, and more. Public managers no longer are unitary leaders of unitary organizations - instead, they often find themselves convening, negotiating, mediating, and collaborating across borders. "Big Ideas in Collaborative Public Management" brings together a rich variety of big picture perspectives on collaborative public management.
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Bingham, L. B., Nabatchi, T. & O’Leary, R.
Leaders in public affairs identify tools and instruments for the new governance through networks of public, private, and nonprofit organizations. We argue the new governance also involves people—the tool makers and tool users—and the processes through which they participate in the work of government.
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Beierle, T. & Cayford, J.
Democracy in Practice brings together, for the first time, the collected experience of 30 years of public involvement in environmental decisionmaking. Using data from 239 cases, the authors evaluate the success of public participation and the contextual and procedural factors that lead to it.
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Agranoff, R
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.