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Recommended Readings

  • Recommended Reading

    Making Collaboration Work: Lessons From Innovation In Natural Resource Management

    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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  • Recommended Reading

    Citizen, Customer, Partner: Engaging the Public in Public Management: Engaging the Public in Public Management

    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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    The Consensus Building Handbook: A Comprehensive Guide to Reaching Agreement

    Susskind, L. E., McKearnen, S. & Thomas-Lamar, J.

    This handbook on group decision-making for those wanting to operate in a consensus fashion stresses the advantages of informal, common sense approaches to working together. It describes how any group can put these approaches into practice, and relates numerous examples of situations in which such approaches have been applied.

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  • Recommended Reading

    Adaptive Governance and Water Conflict: New Institutions for Collaborative Planning

    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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    Why the Garden Club Couldn’t Save Youngstown

    Safford, S.

    In this book, Sean Safford compares the recent history of Allentown, Pennsylvania, with that of Youngstown, Ohio. Allentown has seen a noticeable rebound over the course of the past twenty years. Facing a collapse of its steel-making firms, its economy has reinvented itself by transforming existing companies, building an entrepreneurial sector, and attracting inward investment.

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  • Recommended Reading

    Entrepreneurial strategies for managing interagency collaboration

    Page, S.

    Public administration increasingly entails interagency collaboration, contracting, and other interorganizational arrangements. These loosely coupled alternatives to unified hierarchy alter the nature of managerial work. This article explores how the entrepreneurial strategies that managers find useful in hierarchical agencies apply in collaborative settings where formal authority is lacking and sustaining cooperation among partners is critical for performance.

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  • Recommended Reading

    Public participation for 21st century democracy

    Nabatchi, T. & Leighninger, M.

    Written by two leaders in the field, Public Participation for 21st Century Democracy explores the theory and practice of public participation in decision-making and problem-solving. It examines how public participation developed over time to include myriad thick, thin, and conventional opportunities, occurring in both face-to-face meetings and online settings. The book explores the use of participation in various arenas, including education, health, land use, and state and federal government.

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  • Recommended Reading

    Teaching Collaborative Governance: Phases, Competencies, and Case-Based Learning

    Morse, R. S. & Stephens, J. B.

    Collaborative governance is becoming a primary motif in public administration research and practice. There is widespread recognition of the need to develop leaders for collaborative governance, yet clear guidelines or standard operating procedures are elusive. However, while the literature is varied, a broad model of collaboration phases is distinguishable and core competencies are emerging. This article outlines a four-phase model of collaborative governance and corresponding competencies to help ground education and training for collaborative governance.

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    Collaborative planning: Building consensus and building a distinct model for practice

    Margerum, R. D.

    Collaborative planning is an interactive process of consensus building and implementation using stakeholder and public involvement. Based on research of twenty case studies in the United States and Australia, the author explores some of the most common obstacles that have confronted stakeholder groups in their effort to build consensus, including contextual, compositional, operational, organizational, ideological, and power and capacity.

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  • Recommended Reading

    Weaving Complexity and Business: Engaging the Soul at Work

    Lewin, R. & Regine, B.

    Weaving Complexity and Business brings business people a new way of thinking about and working in the new economy, one that draws on the new science of complexity, which recognizes that business organizations are complex adaptive systems, in which people are crucial but unpredictable factors in their development. It offers managers and companies a deeper understanding of the organizational dynamics of today’s fast-paced/changing business environment both within companies and among them.

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  • Recommended Reading

    Collaborative Public Management and Democracy: Evidence from Western Watershed Partnerships

    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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  • Recommended Reading

    Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision-Making

    Kaner, S.

    The third edition of this ground-breaking book continues to advance its mission to support groups to do their best thinking. It demonstrates that meetings can be much more than merely an occasion for solving a problem or creating a plan. Every well-facilitated meeting is also an opportunity to stretch and develop the perspectives of the individual members, thereby building the strength and capacity of the group as a whole.

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  • Recommended Reading

    The deliberative democracy handbook: Strategies for effective civic engagement in the twenty-first century

    Gastil, J. & Levine, P.

    The Deliberative Democracy Handbook is a resource for democratic practitioners and theorists alike. It combines rich case material from many cities and types of institutional settings with careful reflection on core principles. It generates hope for a renewed democracy, tempered with critical scholarship and political realism. Most important, this handbook opens a spacious window on the innovativeness of citizens in the U.S. (and around the world) and shows how the varied practices of deliberative democracy are part of a larger civic renewal movement.

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  • Recommended Reading

    Collaborative Governance Regimes

    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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  • Recommended Reading

    Managing Public Disputes: A Practical Guide to Handling Conflict and Reaching Agreements (1st Edition)

    Carpenter, S. L. & Kennedy, W.J.D.

    Disputing parties are often not aware of the predictable patterns of behavior in conflict situations, and they cannot usually identify options available for resolving differences. The resulting conflict often escalates and requires third-party professional mediators. Part One provides an overview of public controversies not limited to labor and management disputes where stakeholders are easily identified. Conflict management strategies are discussed. Part Two presents the steps necessary for managing disputes including the final steps of reaching and carrying out agreements.

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  • Recommended Reading

    Designing and implementing cross‐sector collaborations: Needed and challenging

    Bryson, J. M., Crosby, B. C. & Stone, M. M.

    Theoretical and empirical work on collaboration has proliferated in the last decade. The authors’ 2006 article on designing and implementing cross‐sector collaborations was a part of, and helped stimulate, this growth. This article reviews the authors’ and others’ important theoretical frameworks from the last decade, along with key empirical results. Research indicates how complicated and challenging collaboration can be, even though it may be needed now more than ever.

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  • Recommended Reading

    Democracy in practice: Public participation in environmental decisions

    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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  • Recommended Reading

    Collaborative Governance in Theory and Practice

    Ansell, C. & Gash, A

    Over the past few decades, a new form of governance has emerged to replace adversarial and managerial modes of policy making and implementation. Collaborative governance, as it has come to be known, brings public and private stakeholders together in collective forums with public agencies to engage in consensus-oriented decision making. In this article, we conduct a meta-analytical study of the existing literature on collaborative governance with the goal of elaborating a contingency model of collaborative governance.

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