Rosemary O‘Leary Maxwell School of Syracuse University Catherine Gerard Maxwell School of Syracuse University Lisa Blomgren Bingham Indiana University–Bloomington
Introduction
Rosemary O’Leary is Distinguished Professor of Public Administration and codirector of the Program on the Analysis and Resolution of Conflicts at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University which includes the Collaborative Governance Initiative. E-mail:
[email protected]. Catherine Gerard is associate director of executive education and codirector of the Program on the Analysis and Resolution of Conflicts at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University which includes the Collaborative Governance Initiative. E-mail:
[email protected]. Lisa Blomgren Bingham is an honorary senior research fellow in the Program on the Analysis and Resolution of Conflicts at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. She is also the Keller-Runden Professor of Public Service and director of the Indiana Conflict Resolution Institute at the Indiana University School of Public and Environmental Affairs. E-mail:
[email protected].
Introduction to the Symposium on Collaborative Public Management
W
hen researchers arrived at Nueva Vizcaya in the Philippines to study how this rural province, comprising seven indigenous cultural communities enmeshed with other majority groups, had slashed its poverty rate from 52 percent to 3.8 percent in 12 years, how it had lowered unemployment to 4.2 percent, and how it had designed and implemented one of the most successful watershed protection programs in Southeast Asia, they were armed with many hypotheses. Perhaps Nueva Vizcaya’s success could be traced to a charismatic leader who had been trained at one of the best public affairs schools in the world. Perhaps it was attributable to the diffusion of innovation across provinces, states, and countries. Perhaps the province’s success could be traced to the generosity of a Bill Gates–like benefactor. But after months of data collection and analysis, the researchers found that the success of Nueva Vizcaya could not be attributed primarily to any of these factors. Rather, the primary reason for Nueva Vizcaya’s success was collaborative public management implemented within a framework of participatory governance. For example, Nueva Vizcaya governor Rudolfo Agbayani successfully brought together public, private, and nonprofit groups to create and run day-care centers. Indigenous tribes were made partners in forest and watershed management. And the province implemented a participatory planning and budgeting system that engaged citizens in making decisions in a more inclusive way (Ramos-Jiminez, Masulit, and Mendoza 2004). But, you may be thinking, haven’t public administrators always collaborated? Why devote an entire issue of PAR to collaborative public management? Although there is a rich history and literature concerning intergovernmental relations and processes, the coproduction of public goods, and cooperation across sectors, the past 10 years have seen an explosion of new developments in the area of collaborative public management. Some developments have been high-profile initiatives and are known to most of
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Public Administration Review • December 2006 • Special Issue
us. For example, when thousands of residents gathered in 21st Century Town Meetings (see www. americaspeaks.org) using new electronic tools to design the future of Lower Manhattan after September 11, 2001, we all read about it in the popular press. But most examples are not so well known despite their widespread and positive impacts. Consider the following initiatives: • The rapidly growing metropolitan area of Sacramento County, California, is expected to add a million people over the next 20 years. Such a growth rate raises questions about how the community can maintain mobility, enhance air quality, sustain economic prosperity, and preserve the Sacramento region as a livable community. To address concerns about transportation and air quality associated with this growth, county officials initiated the Sacramento Transportation and Air Quality Collaborative, an ongoing, multiphase project facilitated by the California Center for Collaborative Policy (www.csus.edu/ccp). As part of this project, 48 organizations representing business, government, and other interests participated in the design and implementation of Smart Growth policies. • In Oregon, a state–county collaboration led to successful wind farm siting. Wind energy– permitting procedures are typically slow and require coordination among federal, state, and local governments, as well as private business, local residents, and advocacy organizations. When wind power developers targeted Sherman County, Oregon, as a potential development site, the governor initiated a community-level collaborative process. Local leaders convened a team of diverse individuals to implement a consensus-based process that would achieve economic, environmental, and community objectives. The 24-megawatt wind farm was built and continues to provide a renewable source of energy for the region.
• When the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed the Karner blue butterfly as endangered, the Department of Natural Resources in Wisconsin—where there is widespread distribution of the species—developed a statewide Habitat Conservation Plan that would maintain the butterfly habitat while allowing for compatible activities such as highway maintenance. The plan was drafted collaboratively by a group that included environmentalists; representatives of utility companies; leaders in the forest product industry; and local, state, and federal government officials. The concept of a statewide Habitat Conservation Plan was revolutionary, as almost all previous plans had been limited to a small geographic range and included only one or two landowners. • In California, the CALFED Bay-Delta Program involved 15 state and federal agencies and more than 2,000 residents in developing a collaborative agreement to restore ecological health and improve water management in the San Francisco Bay Delta. It encompasses 70 percent of California and is the largest ecosystem restoration project in the United States. • To address repeated flooding in the Northern Plains, the Federal Emergency Management Agency sponsored the International Flood Mitigation Initiative. The initiative brought together stakeholders in the United States and Canada to seek consensus on a regional flood management plan. The group produced 14 distinct initiatives, and implementation is under way. Of course, these are only a few of the hundreds of examples of collaborative public management in existence today, and they are offered here only to whet your appetite and lure you into this special issue of PAR. In fact, when we disseminated our call for papers for this special issue more than a year ago, we were intrigued by the sheer number of examples of collaborative public management that surfaced. Our intent was to pull together some of the best thinkers in the areas of collaborative public management, collaboration as a process, collaborative networks and democracy, and collaborative governance—including experts in both public participation and civic engagement. We wanted to identify and analyze what we know on behalf of the field of public administration. We wanted to push the field by encouraging reflection, innovation, questioning, and theorizing. We were energized by the response. By the time dust settled, the call for papers had yielded 93 proposals from more than 150 scholars and practitioners. Choosing among the proposals was a difficult and daunting task. Collaborative public management, we learned, is an idea that resonates with many in our
field, yet it lacks a common lens or definition and is often studied without the benefit of examining parallel literatures in sister fields. Accordingly, we were forced to make strategic choices about how to define collaborative public management for the purposes of this special issue. Because many of the proposals concerned participatory governance, a working definition of that concept was also developed. We adopted the following definitions, blended from the work of Agranoff and McGuire (2003) and Henton et al. (2006): Collaborative public management is a concept that describes the process of facilitating and operating in multiorganizational arrangements to solve problems that cannot be solved or easily solved by single organizations. Collaborative means to co-labor, to cooperate to achieve common goals, working across boundaries in multisector relationships. Cooperation is based on the value of reciprocity. Participatory governance is the active involvement of citizens in government decision making. Governance means to steer the process that influences decisions and actions within the private, public, and civic sectors. We were also forced to make strategic choices about which proposed articles might best push the field to think critically about these concepts. The main articles in this symposium range from analytical literature reviews to applications of theory borrowed from other disciplines. There are syntheses and examinations of the evolution of collaborative public management, as well as descriptions of what we know about collaborative structures. Our contributors tell us what collaborative managers actually do, and they give us a sneak peek of recent developments in deliberative democracy. They examine the outcomes of collaboration, call for further research, and plead for curriculum changes. The second section of this special issue, “Letters from the Field,” profiles a handful of exemplary collaborative managers, including those who coordinated and carried out the Columbia space shuttle cleanup; three city managers in Iowa; several innovative managers at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency; a private sector entrepreneur who coordinated New Zealand fisheries management; capital planners in Charlotte– Mecklenburg County, North Carolina; collaborators in rural America; cross-agency collaborators in San Francisco; consensus builders at the U.S. Institute for Environmental Conflict Resolution; the designers and implementers of universal prekindergarten education in West Virginia; and an exemplary collaborative manager in homeland security. Introduction 7
The final essay summarizes and critiques the articles in this symposium, looking at them as a coherent whole. All of our contributors agreed that collaboration is of paramount importance for public administration and that managers need to learn the skills of negotiation, facilitation, convening, and collaborative problem solving. Yet there is a gaping hole—a missing connection—in the work on collaborative public management, civic engagement, and public participation, not only with each other but also—and more importantly—with negotiation, conflict resolution, dispute system design, and consensus building. We challenge the field of public administration to remedy this weakness. Maxwell School Collaborative Governance Initiative This special issue of PAR is sponsored by the Program for the Analysis and Resolution of Conflicts (PARC) at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University, which celebrates its 20th anniversary in 2006. The mission of the program is to advance the theory and practice of the analysis of conflict, the resolution of conflict, collaborative problem solving, and collaborative governance. The Collaborative Governance Initiative is responsible for a number of innovations aimed at promoting new knowledge and understanding of collaborative public management. A conference of scholars and practitioners of collaborative public management was held at Syracuse University’s Greenberg House in Washington, D.C., in September 2006. A special issue of the International Public Management Journal focusing on collaborative public management from a comparative perspective will be published in 2007. An edited book on collaborative public management will also be published by Georgetown University Press in 2007. Six new graduate courses in collaboration, negotiation, facilitation, and mediation were launched at the Maxwell School in the fall of 2006. Why? Because the Maxwell School of Syracuse University knows that the world of public administration has changed. Technological innovations such as the Internet, globalism (which permits us to outsource anywhere abroad), devolution (which may bring intergovernmental conflict), and new ideas from network theory have changed the business of government. Public managers now find themselves not as unitary leaders of unitary organizations. Instead, they find themselves convening, facilitating, negotiating, mediating, and collaborating across boundaries. Two people have been instrumental in the development and implementation of this vision— Mitch Wallerstein, dean of the Maxwell School, and Mike Wasylenko, senior associate dean—and we 8
Public Administration Review • December 2006 • Special Issue
thank them for their support. Finally, we thank the reviewers who provided excellent feedback to our authors: Guy Adams, University of Missouri-Columbia Bob Behn, Harvard University Jon Brock, University of Washington Catherine Burke, University of Southern California George Busenberg, University of Colorado-Denver Lisa Dale, University of Colorado-Denver Linda deLeon, University of Colorado-Denver Patrick Dobel, University of Washington Amy Kneedler Donahue, University of Connecticut Jack Donahue, Harvard University Bob Durant, American University Bob Gage, University of Colorado-Denver Linda Kaboolian, Harvard University Lael Keiser, University of Missouri-Columbia Ed Kellough, University of Georgia Steven Maynard-Moody, University of Kansas Ken Meier, Texas A&M University John Nalbandian, University of Kansas Chet Newland, University of Southern California Larry O’Toole, University of Georgia Beryl Radin, American University Hal Rainey, University of Georgia Al Roberts, The Maxwell School of Syracuse University Norma Riccucci, Rutgers University- Newark Sally Selden, Lynchberg College Steven Rathgeb Smith, University of Washington Carl Stenberg, University of North Carolina John Stephens, University of North Carolina Camilla Stivers, Cleveland State University Larry Terry, University of Texas-Dallas Frank Thompson, State University of New York-Albany Vera Vogelsang-Coombs, Cleveland State University Allan Wallis, University of Colorado-Denver Bart Wechsler, University of Missouri-Columbia Alan Zalkind, Rutgers University - Newark Lisa Zanetti, University of Missouri-Columbia To paraphrase former PAR editor-in-chief Chet Newland, one of PAR’s purposes is to promote a floating seminar among managers and scholars, authors and reviewers, and pracademics and students concerning public administration’s most pressing challenges. During the long year of peer review–demanded rewrites, the authors in this special issue were provoked, prodded, and pushed to refine their ideas and to think critically about their analyses. Likewise, we hope this special issue will provoke, prod, and push the field of public administration to be more deliberative and inclusive, seeking a diversity of ideas and inputs that will yield stronger, more robust, and more sustainable public programs and policies.
References Agranoff, Robert, and Michael McGuire. 2003. Collaborative Public Management: New Strategies for Local Governments. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Henton, Doug, John Melville, Terry Amsler, and Malka Kopell. 2006. Collaborative Governance:
A Guide for Grantmakers. Menlo Park, CA: William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. www. hewlett.org [accessed August 14, 2006]. Ramos-Jiminez, Pilar, Saniata P. Masulit, and Ysadora F. Mendoza. 2004. Celebrating Participatory Governance in Nueva Vizcaya. Manila: De La Salle University Press, Social Development Research Center.
Introduction 9
