Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Researchers have dedicated a great deal of scholarly attention to understanding the black box of successful collaborative management. However, competing and sometimes contradictory casual stories about the determinants of effective network management result in continued uncertainty. Research tends to dichotomize the Weberian ideal of bureaucracy (top-down approach) versus fluid, light-on-their-feet, and bottom-up collaboration (McGuire, 2003; 2006). The former is concerned with structural institutions, such as a formal authority, hierarchy, written rules and mandates, while the latter emphasizes the importance of soft aspects, including personal relationship, shared understanding, trust (Ansell & Gash, 2007; McGuire and Agranoff, 2001), and social membership (LeRoux, Brandenburger, & Pandey, 2010). Those who emphasize the positive impact of informal mechanisms are often skeptical of the ability of a centralized authority to sustain collaborative relationships (Kickert, Klijn, and Koppenjan, 1997; Thompson & Perry, 2006), while others caution against the premature abandonment of traditional bureaucratic paradigm by arguing that the blending of the two is prevalent in every day practices. This perspective rejects the either/or treatment that has commonly been used to characterize the drivers of collaboration (Emerson, Nabatchi, & Balogh, 2012; Koontz et al., 2004; McGuire, 2006Provan & Milward, 1995; Provan & Kenis, 2005).

This research seeks an empirical understanding of these different scholarly perspectives about factors that enhance management capacity to collaborate. We use survey data of 504 US cities with populations over 20,000, in which we asked about cities’ structural arrangements as well as administrative apparatus in planning and implementing sustainability initiatives. The survey was conducted from 2015 winter to 2016 spring, and thus allows us to investigate the most up-to-date snapshot of interplay between the formal and informal dynamics that shape U.S. city governments’ decisions to collaborate on sustainability. The empirical model additionally includes other community-level and organizational controls known to influence collaboration effectiveness, importantly: resource munificence of the organization measure through both tangible (i.e. dedicated staff and resources) and intangible resource (i.e. public and interest group support) and the degree of external political environmental influence gauged through the demand and support of elected officials.

This research contributes to the existing literature in two ways: First, the literature is still short of large-N studies that afford generalizable and falsifiable hypotheses. Especially, informal mechanisms are often discussed through case studies due to the difficulty of operationalizing normative assumptions, such as trust and culture. Secondly, while several studies have documented conditions under which successful inter-organizational collaboration occurs, such as between different levels of governments (Daley, 2008) and public-private entities (Koontz & Newig, 2014), still less is known about intra-organizational collaboration. As stated above, by extending the current discussion to observing the interactions between formal and informal dynamics as well as teasing out individual effects within city governments, this research contributes to advancing an empirically-derived and testable knowledge base of both aspects of inter-departmental collaboration.