The Politics of Collaborative Public Management

(Robert Agranoff and Aleksey Kolpakov) 2023

Introduction/ Preface:

 Issues of classic bureaucracy yet confront issues of structure, process, and complexity. In
addition, it places the reader in a world that is both universal and (as COVID-19 has shown)
constantly changing.
 How collaboration is essential to pursue public ends
 Collaborative management is ubiquitous—from the coordination needed to build a new road
or water system to the negotiations needed to carry out more complex intergovernmental
relations to the more recent transitions to remote and hybrid workplaces.
 Evolution of simple bureaucratic functioning to the increasing presence of collaborative
management structures and relationships.
 Collaboration in real-world action requires steering and negotiation in virtually every situation,
with a considerable process that precedes agreement.
 Collaboration is defined here as the process of facilitating and operating in multi-organizational
arrangements for addressing problems and producing solutions through the contributions of
several organizations and individuals.
 Authors Drs. Robert Agranoff and Aleksey Kolpakov demonstrate how interorganizational
/interagency collaboration operates and is managed, as well as how it has been modified or
adjusted in its fundamental core concepts of bureaucratic organization and hierarchy

Classical public administration in the United States reached the pinnacle of its importance in the late
1930s. It left an orthodoxy of principles and structural arrangements that—with significant
modification—continue to influence and define public administrative practice today

Main tenets (principle or belief) was that administrative activity could be:

1. Coordinated by unity of command or

2. By dominance of idea. –

Collaborative governance fits the latter category. It requires public managers to coordinate focused
efforts of two or more entities to promote common purposes in the absence of hierarchical authority.

Although government administration remains largely characterized by hierarchical bureaucracies,

collaborative arrangements and networks have become increasingly salient to administrative practice.

Balanced in not claiming too much for collaborative governance by noting that it augments (extend)
rather than replaces government through hierarchical bureaucracies.

Chapter 1: From Bureaucracy to the Politics and Organization for Collaborative Management

Everywhere we see bureaucracies representing government, but they are no longer the rigid
hierarchies and rule-bound structures as they were once portrayed. Today, we also see strategic
alliances, partnerships, coalitions, joint ventures, contracts, franchises, networks, and more (Ring & Van
de Ven, 1994).
The challenge to agency hierarchies involves the flow of information aided by the personal computer,
e-mail, and the internet, which have all “allowed ordinary citizens to organize themselves into much
larger and dispersed networks than has ever been possible before,” observes Niall Ferguson (Ferguson,
2014).

Today, there are interagency task forces, interdepartmental task forces, intergovernmental bodies,
contractor–contractee connections, multiple agency task forces, interorganizational contracts, leases,
services delivery and sponsoring agencies, public–private alliances, and networks of public and private
agencies/organizations of all types that interact with every level of local to national bureaucracies.

Example Today: Many of the major societal problems that attract public attention, including climate
change. (bureaucratic arrangements no longer match the prevailing operating environment of public
policy). As a result, governments and their bureaucratic organizations have come under increasing
pressure to adapt to the new environmental conditions.

As a result of these conditions, bureaucracy now is considerably less executivecentered in practice and
theory (Rosenbloom, 2010) and focuses its work on public problems with a host of connected public
agencies and NGOs to meet its challenges (Powell, 1990; Ring & Van de Ven, 1994). Bureaucracies do
indeed exist— but in a series of multiagency arenas to meet the challenges of vested interest,
uncertainty, contested knowledge, and continuing debate, all leading to new interactive conditions for
bureaucracy in the collaborative era.

Collaboration is also political in nature.

Chapter 11: The Future Politics of Public Bureaucracy in a Connected Era
Public organizations are not disappearing, but they are changing mightily.

Transformations are essential, so too is related governance in complex inter-organizational relations, multiactor
policy-making, and operations in inter-organizational connections (Osborne, 2010).

William Fulton identifies some of the changes beyond self-driving cars and the decline of retail stores that will lead
to the “automated city” as cities continue to take advantage of the efficiency of proximity, “as work is automated
and transactions move online, the nature of economic efficiency will be transformed” (2018, p. 23)

Moreover, it is fundamentally changing the nature of work, particularly face-to-face work like collaborative.
Work will continue to be organized differently in adaptive entities and managed inward and outward in urbanized
areas.
Traditionally and formally, bureaucracy is about divisions and legally charged missions and purposes, and in
that sense they remain—but they are in altered form. Many authority lines in a traditional sense still “remain” but
are now manifested differently, and—as will be demonstrated—not necessarily because politics and power do
remain, as they are shifting externally.

Introducing 2.0 Interacting Organizations

What is the organization of the future becoming? While there are no certainties, it is politics of agreement and the
possible—politically and operationally—will somehow fall somewhere between the rigid rule-bound hierarchies
and loose open structuring that shifts with the need to make missions compatible with political and operational
expectations. Both authors’ most diverse 2.0 experience (Agranoff, 2012a; Kolpakov, Agranoff, & McGuire, 2016)

The development and maintenance of Metro are accomplished through the interactive networking of students,
parents, teachers, school administrators, partner representatives, learning site representatives, and others. 2.0
networked entity held together by collaboration. (Thus not an organization in the standard, hierarchical, or 1.0
sense).

Organizational Features: 1.0 and 2.0 Compared

Chapter 6: The Politics of it All
Collaboration analyzed in this volume represent an operationalization of more or less formal
means of coordination; they are mechanisms through which organizational connection may occur
and exhibit “norms that bound the behavior of the actors involved” (Chisholm, 1992, p. 19). In
CP, they involve the ultimate “coordination without hierarchy”; that is, politics and
administration in collaborating.