Abstract
John Donahue and Richard Zeckhauser’s book, Collaborative Governance, makes an important contribution to the growing literature on “collaborative” or “shared” or “third-party” or “networked” governance. (The field does not yet have one name that all commentators agree on.) The Donahue-Zeckhauser book takes its place alongside other notable books by Agranoff (2007); Goldsmith and Eggers (2004); Goldsmith and Kettl (2009); Koliba, Meek, and Zia (2011); O’Leary and Bingham (2009); Salamon (2002); and others.
For Donahue and Zeckhauser and many of these other scholars, the origins of collaborative governance lie in the increasing scope and complexity of public problems that make it difficult for government agencies to handle these big problems on their own. In fact, what has evolved is a complex system of public problem solving that often engages multiple organizations—from different levels of government and the nonprofit and business sectors—in addressing any single challenge. As Donahue and Zeckhauser (p. 4) put it, government has come to realize it needs the “force multiplier” that multiple organizations from different sectors can provide to help address difficult problems.
Donahue and Zeckhauser begin their thoughtful analysis by observing that collaborations vary in terms of how much discretion the different collaborators have. With some government contracts, government specifies the private contractor’s task so completely that the private contractor really has very little discretion. On the other hand, private parties may have relatively free rein in accomplishing some public missions, as, for example, private and religious schools have significant latitude in delivering elementary and secondary education. Donahue and Zeckhauser’s main interest is in exploring the vast middle ground, where public and private agencies truly share responsibility for addressing public purposes.
Collaborative Governance is written largely from government’s point of view, and, according to Donahue and Zeckhauser, collaborations often make sense for government because they yield improvements in productivity, information, legitimacy, and resources:
Productivity: The U.S. Department of Energy gave contractor Kaiser-Hill significant flexibility in reclaiming the contaminated Rocky Flats site near Denver with the result that the clean up of the old, nuclear weapons factory was finished a year ahead of the contractual schedule and more than fifty years ahead of DOE’s original projections. (pp. 66-71) Information: Private-sector employers are generally well-positioned to know what skills would most benefit particular workers and how to train them. Thus, as Donahue and Zeckhauser point out, it makes good sense for government to lean heavily on private-sector employers to deliver government-funded, job-training assistance. (pp. 105-107) Legitimacy: Americans are predisposed to favor private over governmental approaches to addressing public problems. Thus, when government vastly expanded its support for health care to the elderly in the 1960s, it created a Medicare program that relies heavily on private doctors and hospitals rather than creating a new system of public providers. (pp. 138-140) Resources: Government also turns to collaborators who can bring new resources to help advance public missions. In New York City, the cash-starved Parks Department partnered with the private Central Park Conservancy which was able to raise significant philanthropic funds to clean up and care for Central Park. (pp. 161-169)
While Donahue and Zeckhauser assure readers that there is much to be gained from collaboration, an important contribution of their book is their analysis of what can go wrong with collaboration and what government officials can do to minimize these shortcomings. In this context, the authors discuss three kinds of “discretion”—one good and two not so good—that are associated with collaborations: “production,” “payoffs,” and “preferences.” “Production discretion” for private collaborators is generally a desirable feature of collaborations since private organizations need some flexibility to deliver hoped-for increases in efficiency and effectiveness. But problems may arise when private collaborators have the ability to siphon off significant value—or “payoffs”—from the collaboration. For example, when the government sensibly collaborates with chemical factories, nuclear plants, or shipping ports to identify the best ways to install antiterrorism and other security measures, the businesses may push for solutions that maximize their private benefits. When they have “preference discretion,” private collaborators bend decisions in line with their own preferences rather than the interests of the broader public, as, for example, when the private Central Park Conservancy, with its many wealthy donors, favors flower beds and Shakespeare over sports fields and other uses that might be preferred by the general public (p. 169).
Donahue and Zeckhauser suggest that a critical challenge for public managers is to secure the benefits of collaboration and production discretion without paying too high a price in payoff and preference discretion. With charter schools, government has the difficult task of maximizing gains in student achievement that can be achieved by giving high-performing charters greater operational flexibility while minimizing the negative impact of low-performing charters which deliver little public benefit. In the higher education student financial assistance programs, Donahue and Zeckhauser argue that the federal government must balance the legitimacy and efficiencies which are gained by using private banks to deliver aid against the “payoffs” that these banks may demand to participate in government programs. The authors point out that the federal government paid an exorbitant price in the student loan guarantee program to gain the legitimacy and efficiency of having private banks make loans. In collaborating with the private Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) to certify hospitals for Medicare eligibility, the federal government sought to gain the legitimacy of leaving responsibility for health-related decisions in private hands. However, Donahue and Zeckhauser suggest a continuing challenge for government is to balance the significant discretion that has been given to JCAHO with sufficient government oversight to be sure government and the public get the information they need.
To guard against excessive payoffs to private parties and too much deference to private preferences, Donahue and Zeckhauser advise government to take care in its monitoring and motivating of its private collaborators. With monitoring, government officials must decide who will do the oversight: the bureau running the program, a department-wide monitoring office, a government-wide oversight office like the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) or the Government Accountability Office (GAO) at the federal level, or a third-party monitor. Of course, there is no single right answer; different monitors may be appropriate for different programs. However, the key is that some monitoring generally must be done to insure satisfactory performance. Similarly, government must motivate its collaborators to deliver high-quality goods and services. The authors’ sensible, bottom-line advice to government is that if monitoring is too costly and incentives won’t work, then government should not collaborate.
My quibbles with Donahue and Zeckhauser are relatively minor. While the authors provide many helpful suggestions to would-be collaborators, I came away feeling they could have done a bit more to push their smart analytic framework to produce useful advice to practitioners. The penultimate chapter advises government collaborators to take care in analyzing government’s goals, assigning the right players to partnerships, designing the collaboration so that collaborators have the appropriate responsibilities, and assessing results. This discussion seemed somewhat generic and only moderately helpful although, as the authors humbly and wisely admit, much about collaborations seems to depend on context, and it is undoubtedly hard to identify simple rules to guide practitioners. However, I am sure those in the trenches and other readers as well would have been grateful for a few more clear guides to action.
Similarly, Donahue and Zeckhauser fail to build on their insightful differentiation of the kinds of goods and services that government supports. “Public goods,” like national defense, benefit the whole country; “semiprivate goods,” like neighborhood playgrounds mainly serve those in the immediate area; and “directed goods,” like Social Security checks are delivered to specific individuals. These distinctions are interesting, but the authors do not make clear how they help us better understand whether and how collaboration should take place.
In Collaborative Governance, the authors group a lot of activity together as collaboration that might usefully be differentiated, as Salamon does by analyzing the different patterns of collaboration that occur with different “tools” of government (i.e., grants, contracts, regulation, loans, loan guarantees, etc.).
In their discussion of legitimacy, the authors suggest that “legitimacy . . . generally follows efficiency—though it typically follows a few paces behind and has a tendency to wander” (p. 124). But considering this claim in a comparative context raises some questions about it. Different countries clearly tend to legitimize different mixes of private and public sector approaches. But it is not at all clear that these different national approaches to legitimacy result from different levels of efficiency of private and public service delivery in the different countries. In fact, it seems that “legitimacy” may be partly independent of “efficiency,” with the United States holding private approaches legitimate not only because they may be more efficient but for other reasons deeply rooted in our history and American Creed.
Finally, I worry that the authors may implicitly overstate the value of the resources—particularly private philanthropy—that private collaborators can bring to the table in collaborations. With its limited size—there was a total of US$300 billion in philanthropy in 2011—private donations can fill only very selective holes for a US$5.3 trillion government enterprise. Arts and parks, which are highlighted in the book, may be two of the few fields where philanthropy is able to add significant funds to government’s own resources.
The Donahue and Zeckhauser book is an important addition to the literature on collaborative governance. However, even with this important new contribution, there is a lot of important work yet to be done in this field. Collaborative Governance is yet one more analysis that looks at collaboration from government’s point of view. It would be very helpful to have studies that examine collaboration from the perspective of nonprofits or businesses. Further systematic empirical work is also needed. Donahue and Zeckhauser barely scratch the surface with their study of six services in four cities. Finally, more work needs to be done in terms of facilitating skill development for collaborative managers, and more thought needs to be given to how to get managers to appreciate the value of collaboration in the first place. After all, it seems our most celebrated managers are still empire builders like Robert Moses rather than high-performing, often behind-the scenes collaborators who may do as much or more to advance the public interest.
I highly recommend this book for scholars, students, policy makers, and managers in government, nonprofit, and business organizations interested in collaboration. The authors’ analysis is sound, and there is much to be learned from the book. Moreover, the book reads well, with numerous examples provided to bring the authors’ analytic framework to life.