Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

The design and implementation of public policies increasingly occurs through collaborations among multiple organizations with different missions and capabilities. The partners in these collaborations face numerous collective decisions (Ostrom 1990). They must determine their shared goals, define problems to address together, and specify which activities to pursue and how (Huxham and Vangen 2005; Gray 1989). They must also design membership rules, governing structures, and processes for making decisions (Provan and Kenis 2008; Gray 1989).

Collective decisions are political because they require mediating diverse partner interests. Even partners with shared goals are likely to hold varied values and power bases that generate conflict over how best to pursue their aims (Huxham and Vangen 2005). Power differences in collaborations stem from the partner organizations’ differential dependencies and needs for resources (Emerson 1962) as well as their embeddedness in distinct societal institutions (Hardy and Clegg 1996). Compounding these power differences, collaborations are likely to face conflicts among distinct public values (Page, Stone, Bryson and Crosby 2015), because they feature multiple institutional logics (Herranz 2008) and accountability relationships (Koppell 2005, Thomson and Perry 2006).

The literature on collaboration needs a systematic understanding of how differences in power and values affect collective decisions and the achievement of collaborative partners’ aims. Some scholars argue that partners with greater power tend to exert more influence over decisions of all types (Ansell and Gash 2008; McGuire and Agranoff 2011). Others suggest that conflicts and power fluctuate among collaborative partners depending on governance structure, type of decision process, and scope of participation (Kingsley 1997; Fung 2006). To investigate these claims, this paper develops hypotheses concerning: a) likely sources of power differentials among partners; b) likely sources of value conflicts; c) the direct influence of power differentials and value conflicts on collective decisions; and, d) the mediating influences of particular governance structures, decision processes, and scopes of participation on how power differentials and value conflicts affect specific types of collective decisions.

The paper then proposes a research design and measures of key variables to test the hypotheses using data on collaborations working to improve K-12 public education, in particular those following the STRIVE/Collective Impact model. Public education is a contentious policy field with seemingly intractable problems rooted in socio-economic and political disparities, so it is rife with both value conflicts and power differences. The STRIVE/Collective Impact model assumes that collaborations among influential institutional leaders from all sectors, parents, and community organizations can achieve substantive changes that improve educational outcomes for children from disadvantaged backgrounds (Kania & Kramer 2011). Critics contend that intrinsic value conflicts and institutional power differentials among collaborative partners inhibit such accomplishments (Boumgarden and Branch 2013).

By studying a controversial model in a contentious policy field, this study proposes to analyze critical cases (Patton 2001) of relationships among partners’ power differentials and value conflicts, governance structures and processes, and various types of decisions. Understanding these relationships better can help scholars, policymakers and practitioners move beyond simplistic assumptions of collaborative advantage (Huxham and Vangen 2005).