Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Abstract: Public policies increasingly rely on collaborations among public, nonprofit, and private sector partners with distinct goals. Even partners who share goals may have different power bases that generate conflicts about the partners’ shared aims or about how they jointly define the problems they are addressing as well as prospective solutions to the problems (Huxham and Vangen 2005).

This paper analyzes the potential role of power in the framing of shared problems and solutions among the partners in local cross-sector partnerships. Framing is a social process that makes some aspects of perceived reality more salient than others, privileging certain definitions of problems and solutions over others (Entman 1993). Because some definitions of policy problems and prospective solutions align more with the goals of some collaborative partners than others, we investigate how power differences among partners affect whose goals or aims become central to the partners’ shared definitions of problems and solutions.

Our data come from the web sites and publications of a representative sample of sites in the national STRIVE network of 73 local collaborations that use the Collective Impact (CI) framework to improve public education, along with interviews in selected sites. The CI framework assumes that collaborations among influential institutions from the nonprofit, public, and private sectors, along with parents and community organizations, can pursue a common agenda to improve educational outcomes for children from disadvantaged backgrounds (Kania & Kramer 2011). Skeptics contend that agreeing on a common agenda and improving outcomes are more difficult than the CI framework assumes, because they inevitably confront power differences and conflicts (Boumgarden and Branch 2013; Milward et al. 2016).

We therefore ask: How do individual stakeholders’ aims affect local STRIVE sites’ common agendas – as reflected in their shared frames for problems and solutions? Are certain stakeholders’ aims privileged over others? Using our data, we identify each site’s shared frames for problems (e.g., low graduation rates) and solutions to address them (embodied in a program strategy or activities, a theory of change, or shared priorities). We analyze how influential stakeholders’ mission or program goals align with the frames for shared problems and solutions in each site. Finally, we compare sites’ framing of problems and solutions to understand:

• Common frames for shared problems and solutions;
• Similarities and differences across sites’ frames for problems and solutions;
• How power differences among the partners shape sites’ shared frames.

• Local conditions in the education field vary enough that even similar problems require different solutions in different communities; or
• The power relations among the partners in different sites vary enough that the sites end up pursuing distinct solutions to similar problems.

Further research and analysis are needed to determine whether cross-site differences in frames derive more from local conditions or from partners’ power relations.