Competitors and Cooperators: A Micro‐Level Analysis of Regional Economic Development Collaboration Networks

Predispositions and orientation toward cooperation or competition with other jurisdictions can play a critical role in implementing regional collaboration. By examining collaboration at the micro level, this article investigates how individual factors, including perceptions of cooperation and competition, as well as institutional and environmental factors, are related to regional collaboration. In particular, the authors assert that competitive motivation may support the emergence of regional governance mechanisms. This article explores the relationships between competitive/cooperative motivations and interlocal collaboration networks based on a network survey conducted in the Orlando, Florida, metropolitan area. The authors apply a quadratic assignment procedure regression analysis to examine how dyadic conceptual ties of cooperation and competition, along with the effect of community characteristics, affect policy network structures for economic development. By comparing estimated coefficients with sampling distributions of coefficients from all of the permuted data sets, the regression results indicate the influences of perceived competition/cooperation on the network exchange.     

Achieving Effective Collaborations to Help Communities Age Well

Effective policy responses to the ageing of the population are a priority area for government and non‐government agencies across Australia, particularly at the community level. This article focuses on the policy goal of ageing well at the local level, and more specifically, the strong principle of collaboration that underpins this goal. Too little is known about how to achieve effective collaboration in the ageing field. This article aims to address this by developing an analytical framework from the broad literature on collaborative processes, and applying this framework to data collected from interviews with stakeholders in ageing across two local communities in Queensland. While participants recognise the importance and strength of working together and provide local examples of how this has been achieved effectively, they also acknowledge the associated challenges and complexity. This all spanned the six factors of the framework: the context of ageing; the characteristics and relationships between partners; the need for adequate procedures; as well as structure and relationships aimed at building capacity; a shared sense of purpose; and access to adequate resources.     

Developing and Testing a Theoretical Framework for Computer‐Mediated Transparency of Local Governments

This article contributes to the emerging literature on transparency by developing and empirically testing a theoretical framework that explains the determinants of local government Web site transparency. It aims to answer the following central question: What institutional factors determine the different dimensions of government transparency? The framework distinguishes three dimensions of transparency—decision making transparency, policy information transparency, and policy outcome transparency—and hypothesizes three explanations for each: organizational capacity, political influence, and group influence on government. Results indicate that each dimension of transparency is associated with different factors. Decision‐making transparency is associated with political influence; when left‐wing parties are strong in the local council, local government tends to be more transparent. Policy information transparency is associated with media attention and external group pressure, and policy outcome transparency is associated with both external group pressure and the organizational capacity. The authors discuss the implications for policy and administration.     

Spillover Effects: Immigrant Policing and Government Skepticism in Matters of Health for Latinos

To what extent do people become less trusting of the government under threatening policy contexts? The authors find evidence that Secure Communities, a bureaucratic program that enhances immigrant policing through collaboration between local law and immigration enforcement agencies, spurs mistrust among Latinos but not non‐Latinos. This article focuses on the politics of immigration and health, two issue areas marked by large‐scale bureaucratic developments over the last 50 years. The authors argue that a major consequence of expanding immigrant policing is its trickle‐down effect on how individuals view public institutions charged with the provision of public goods, such as health information. The results indicate that Latinos in locales where immigrant policing is most intense express lower levels of trust in government as a source of health information. Through a policy feedback lens, the findings suggest that the state's deployment of immigrant policing conveys more widespread lessons about the trustworthiness of government .     

Regional Governance and Institutional Collective Action for Environmental Sustainability

This research investigates why various mechanisms of cooperation among local authorities are chosen using the theoretical lens of institutional collective action (ICA). The article analyzes 564 local collaboration agreements drawn from four urban regions of China to explain the choices of environmental collaboration agreements among cities. Examples of three forms of interlocal agreements—informal, formal, and imposed agreements—are analyzed. Ordinal logistic regressions are estimated to test which factors predicted by the ICA framework influence the form of collaboration selected. The results indicate that the involvement of national or provincial government, the number of policy actors involved, heterogeneity of economic conditions, and differences in administrative level among the actors involved influence how collaboration agreements are structured. Examining the choice of agreement type contributes to the understanding of interlocal collaboration and provides practical insights for public managers to structure interlocal collaboration.     

Equity in Federal Contracting: Examining the Link between Minority Representation and Federal Procurement Decisions

The federal government increasingly relies on nongovernmental organizations for procuring goods and services. This long‐term trend presents a significant challenge for administrators because it risks the egalitarian values of democracy by further distancing administrative action from direct, participative, democratic oversight. The authors put forward a theory of representative bureaucracy as a way to reconcile democracy with the reality of the contemporary policy process in which unelected officials are the principal decision makers. The theory is tested in the domain of federal procurement, specifically within the contract award decisions of 60 federal agencies over three years. The authors argue that increased minority representation in leadership positions results in an increased proportion of federal contracts awarded to small minority‐owned firms.     

Documenting Disparity in Minority Contracting: Legal Requirements and Recommendations for Policy Makers

The challenge of advancing policy goals and public administration is compounded when legal compliance rests on data and complex analysis. This is true of disparity studies that support local government‐sponsored minority contracting programs. How can local governments prepare to work with such programs in this complex environment? The authors analyze several court cases challenging minority contracting programs and illustrate the difficulty of administering public programs at the juncture of public policy goals, subtle changes in law, and demands for quality statistical analysis. Many public agencies, especially at the local level, are not prepared to address the data requirements demanded by these programs. To help with this challenge, the authors develop a set of guiding principles to help practitioners satisfy the legal requirements and meet the policy goals of minority contracting and similar programs. This includes a new emphasis on continuous gathering of valid, local‐level data.     

Many Hands Make Light Work: The Role of Collaborative Management in Improving Environmental Information Management by Local Authorities

ABSTRACT

What is the role of collaborative management (CM) in enhancing environmental outputs? Does CM enable local municipalities to be better environmental performers? The present article addresses these two questions by means of a study of all urban localities in Israel (80% response rate). The aims of the study are to contribute to current research in two main ways. First, by addressing the question: Does CM enable local municipalities to be better environmental performers? In doing so, the study expands the very small number of studies conducted to date that examine performance and policy outputs of collaboration versus collaboration processes and procedures. Second, the study contributes to enlarging the very small number of relatively large N studies on collaborative public management that examine policy outputs. The main finding of this study highlights the important and positive role of CM in regard to local authorities’ environmental outputs.     

Assessing Public Procurement of Innovation as a Cross‐Domain Policy: A Framework and Application to the Chinese Context

Despite the fact that public procurement of innovation (PPI) has become an increasingly popular policy tool, there has been a lack of holistic approaches to assessing policies promoting PPI. This article attempts to address this gap by proposing a framework which links the multiple levels and aspects related to the design and implementation of PPI policies. By adopting a systemic understanding of “public procurement” as well as “innovation policies,” this article positions PPI as a cross‐domain policy which is inherently a mix of procurement and innovation‐related interventions. The article develops an assessment framework using “vertical coherence” and “horizontal coherence” as criteria. It then illustrates the use of the framework by applying it to PPI policies in China. The framework can aid the conduct of ex ante as well as ex post assessment of PPI policies, which can further inform policy design, implementation, and learning.     

Institutional Collective Action and Economic Development Joint Ventures

There is high interest in economic development efforts involving cooperation or collaboration among metropolitan jurisdictions. To determine why some local governments engage in cooperative agreements while others do not, this paper investigates transaction obstacles, including bargaining, information, agency, enforcement, and division problems. The authors then advance an institutional collective action explanation for intergovernmental cooperation, focusing on the conditions under which these transactions costs are low. This work anticipates that the costs associated with interlocal cooperation are influenced by the demographic characteristics of communities, local political institutions, and the nature of regional government networks. Empirical analysis based on a national survey of local development officials provides support for several predictions from this model and identifies policy variables that, in turn, increase the prospects for cooperation, specifically through the development of informal policy networks.     

The Effect of Administrative Burden on Bureaucratic Perception of Policies: Evidence from Election Administration

This article argues that administrative burden—that is, an individual's experience of policy implementation as onerous—is an important consideration for administrators and influences their views on policy and governance options. The authors test this proposition in the policy area of election administration using a mixed‐method assessment of local election officials. They find that the perceived administrative burden of policies is associated with a preference to shift responsibilities to others, perceptions of greater flaws and lesser merit in policies that have created the burden (to the point that such judgments are demonstrably wrong), and opposition to related policy innovations.     

Analyzing Territorial and Sectorial Dimensions of Public–Private Partnerships in Science,Technology, and Innovation policies

The performance of innovation systems depends, to a great extent, on the degree of public–private collaboration they involve. Thus, innovation policies often aim to enhance this collaboration through public–private partnerships. These partnerships are a multidimensional phenomenon whose success depends on factors related to each of their dimensions. This paper proposes the use of an analytical model that reflects the multidimensional nature of public–private partnerships and analyses to what extent they are applied in a specific innovation system in order to identify the territorial and sectorial factors that act as barriers or drivers to use them. This model aims to help policy makers design appropriate public–private partnerships in each context. The case under review is the Spanish innovation system, given that this system has been suffering from a structural lack of collaboration for several decades, despite the implementation of policies aimed to foster this. Thus, if the model works, it should be able to identify key factors that influence greater or more restricted use of the different PPP formulas.     

The Transaction Costs of Government Responses to the COVID-19 Emergency in Latin America

The COVID-19 pandemic has created a crisis that is challenging national and local governments to innovate in their responses to novel problems. Despite similarities to the challenges confronted in developed countries, for Latin American governments, these problems are amplified by structural obstacles such as social inequalities. These countries must respond with capacities and resources that are often limited by spoils systems and by social and political polarization. This essay provides an overview of some innovative practices in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico. In particular, this essay concentrates on some salient collaborative efforts in the region. To draw lessons from these practices, the authors focus on the formal and informal institutions that facilitate or obstruct collaboration across jurisdictions. The findings are discussed in terms of the transaction costs of collaboration identified in these experiences.     

Can the Use of Recommended Procurement Practices Save Money?

Procurement is an essential business function of government. Despite the importance of effective procurement practices to government efficiency, very little is known about what local governments do in practice, and how procurement practices affect government spending. This paper reports the results of a survey on procurement practices used by New York State school districts. To examine the potential costs savings from adoption of particular procurement practices, the authors estimate cost models for materials, supplies, and equipment spending. Results from the cost model indicate that the use of competitive bidding, purchasing calendars, central warehouses, and bidders lists are associated with significant cost savings.     

Implementing Open Innovation in the Public Sector: The Case of Challenge.gov

As part of the Open Government Initiative, the Barack Obama administration has called for new forms of collaboration with stakeholders to increase the innovativeness of public service delivery. Federal managers are employing a new policy instrument called Challenge.gov to implement open innovation concepts invented in the private sector to crowdsource solutions from previously untapped problem solvers and to leverage collective intelligence to tackle complex social and technical public management problems. The authors highlight the work conducted by the Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies at the General Services Administration, the administrator of the Challenge.gov platform. Specifically, this Administrative Profile features the work of Tammi Marcoullier, program manager for Challenge.gov , and Karen Trebon, deputy program manager, and their role as change agents who mediate collaborative practices between policy makers and public agencies as they navigate the political and legal environments of their local agencies. The profile provides insights into the implementation process of crowdsourcing solutions for public management problems, as well as lessons learned for designing open innovation processes in the public sector.     

Policy Design and Achieving Social Outcomes: A Comparative Analysis of Social Enterprise Policy

This article compares American, British, and Korean social enterprise policies to explore how government policy design shapes social enterprises and how “social benefit” and “public value” are defined. A social enterprise is defined as the legally structured organizational pursuit of blending social purpose and economic profit through business activities, and examples from each country are presented. Applying Bozeman's publicness theory, the authors demonstrate the wide range of roles that governments play in shaping social enterprises' ownership, funding, and control across the three countries using regulations, subsidies, and procurement policies. These roles may affect the impact of social enterprises in society. The case studies show that the U.S. approach to social enterprise policy is heavily market oriented, while the United Kingdom is in the middle of the market-to-publicness continuum, and South Korea is much closer to the publicness (government-dominated) end of the continuum.     

High‐Speed Rail: Lessons for Policy Makers from Experiences Abroad

In April 2009, the U.S. government unveiled its blueprint for a national network of high‐speed passenger rail (HSR) lines, aimed at reducing traffic congestion, cutting national dependence on foreign oil, and improving rural and urban environments. In implementing such a project, it is essential to identify the factors that might influence decision making and the eventual success of the HSR project, as well as to foresee the obstacles that must be overcome. The authors review, summarize, and analyze the most important HSR projects carried out to date around the globe, focusing on the main concerns of HSR projects: their impact on mobility, the environment, the economy, and urban centers. The authors identify lessons for policy makers and managers who are implementing HSR projects.     

Newspapers and Budgeting: The Effects of Media Coverage on Local Expenditure Decisions

The media play an important role for the political agenda. It is less clear, however, how strong the media impact is on political decisions. This article pursues a different approach from the one commonly used in the media–policy research tradition. Instead of focusing on the relationship between the content of the media agenda and the political agenda, it is argued here that from a broader policy perspective, media pressure on the incumbents is a more relevant variable. Media pressure is measured as media competition and media coverage. Furthermore, the article investigates the effect of media variables on budgetary decisions in different spending areas, and compares the relationships between media pressure and policy under various economic, political and institutional conditions. This allows the authors to investigate which factors hinder and promote media influence on policy. The units of analysis are the Danish municipalities, which are similar political units with different newspaper coverage. Coverage by local newspapers is intense in some municipalities, but absent in others. As expected, the authors find that in municipalities with intensive coverage from local newspapers, local politicians do feel a stronger media pressure. However, when it comes to budgetary decisions, almost no observable effects of media pressure are found, either generally or in favourable political, economic or institutional settings.     

Core–Peripheral Structure and Regional Governance: Implications of Paul Krugman’s New Economic Geography for Public Administration

Paul Krugman’s work is much celebrated in the fields of international trade and economic geography, recognized with the 2008 Nobel Prize in Economics. Although his work is less prominent in public administration, it has important implications for the study of political fragmentation, collaboration, economic development, and service delivery in metropolitan areas. The authors discuss how Krugman’s core–periphery model adds a critical piece to the regional governance puzzle by explaining the concentration and dispersion of economic activity and the productive advantages of spatial closeness. They summarize the central propositions of Krugman’s work to identify its policy inferences for intergovernmental coordination and strategies for successful management of urban growth, as well as its implications for public administration theories of governance, collaboration, and institutional collective action.     

Australia's Children ‘Safe and Well’?1 Collaborating with Purpose Across Commonwealth Family Relationship and State Child Protection Systems

So ubiquitous is reference to collaboration in policy documents that it is in danger of being ignored altogether by service deliverers who are not clear about its rationale, how it is built, or its real value. This is evident in the child and family services context where for example the National Framework for Protecting Australia's Children calls for collaboration and a ‘shared responsibility’ across the state, Commonwealth and the non‐government sectors to keep children safe and well. This article describes a project undertaken to analyse and ultimately increase levels of collaboration between state and Commonwealth government family service providers. The research reinforced an important message that levels of collaboration should align with the vulnerability of children and their families: the greater the level of risks to children, the greater the level of collaboration needed within and between systems to keep children safe.