Governing has been a challenge ever since people became sedentary and started to live together in ever larger concentrations. As time unfolded, governing intensified as it became more complex. In the Western world, we now live in imagined communities where the bulk of the population lives in urban areas. It is in the context of densely populated urban environments that governments will and cannot but seek the aid of nonprofit and private actors if they desire to meet citizen demand. The concept of governance captures the extent to which public organizations in the current situation must collaborate with nonprofit and private actors for the delivery of collective services. While public organizations still, and will continue to, deal with multitudes of ordinary problems, it is the “wicked problems” that more than ever require multiagency, intergovernmental, nonprofit, and private-sector collaboration. Civil servants, and especially the policy bureaucrats (cf. Edward C. Page and Bill Jenkins, Policy Bureaucracy: Governing with a Cast of Thousands, 2005), cannot but engage in multiple interactions with a wide range of actors if they wish to address the many “wicked” challenges that cannot adequately be addressed by a singular organization.
Does government lack the will, the skill, and the wallet to meet its missions, as John Donahue and Richard Zeckhauser write in the opening sentence of the inside jacket text (also p. 3) of their book? Not really. Indeed, the authors have been evenhanded, showing that any actor in a collaborative governance (CG) arrangement can succeed or fail depending on the institutional arrangements that secure and assure public service delivery. Central to their evocative description of CG is that it is an iterative process, a cycle of collaboration, in which the various partners analyze, assign, design, and assess (p. 224).
The operative concepts are shared discretion and monitoring or oversight to assure that discretion is not abused. Too often are private and nonprofit actors guided by self-interest (e.g., pp. 141, 153, 233, 272). Referring to the 2008 collapse of the financial markets in the United States, the authors point to the dangers of unwatched outside monitors, noting that the “major bond-rating services—handsomely paid for keeping close tabs on risk—fell somewhere on the spectrum from comatose to corrupt” (p. 216). They liken the role of government to that of a ringmaster in a circus who oversees all performers and all animals and who has a sophisticated understanding of all that happens under “the big top” (pp. 236–38). While intriguing, the ringmaster analogy does not really work. After all, a situation of true CG cannot but have many ringmasters (cf. shared discretion; see also Robert Agranoff, Collaborating to Manage: A Primer for the Public Sector, 2012). Implicitly, the authors acknowledge such when they write that “government serves multiple masters with complex objectives” (p. 232) and that the “collaborative model combines humility about government's operational capacity with an insistence that government cannot abdicate its primordial role in designating legitimate collective missions” (p. 257). CG or not, government is still the only actor that can make authoritative decisions on behalf of the entire citizenry!
Case studies are sprinkled throughout the text and the authors convincingly make their case for CG. It is a pleasurable read, not bogged down by scholarly jargon and showing—in between the lines—that CG is not “yet” another fashion in the arsenal of public policy instruments but a necessity that requires careful attention. Footnotes clearly show how they have mined scholarly literature, but there are omissions. Why mention the work of Mancur Olson, Oliver Williamson, Robert Axelrod, and Ronald Coase on collective action (p. 5, n. 2) but not Elinor Ostrom's work on collaborative arrangements at the local level; the coproduction literature of the 1980s; the 1987 Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations report, “The Organization of Local Public Economies,” that distinguished between provision, production, and governance; the public–private partnership (PPP) literature of the 1980s and 1990s; and the network literature of the past 20 years? (In all fairness, PPP is mentioned briefly on p. 256.) However, it is easy to fault the authors for what they did not promise to do. There are a few comments, though, that came across as awkward.
The first and most important comment concerns government's skill, will, and wallet, as mentioned earlier. The alliteration is great, but too easily plays upon stereotypical ideas about government performance. With regard to skill, let us make sure that we know what is at issue here. The skill is there, in government. There are very few and perhaps even no (Western) governments that lack the skills and knowledge to consider, in-house, what needs to be done; governments have hired whatever expertise they thought was needed. Thus, governments hire for many skills, and they know how to find these skills too. As for “will,” I can only say that governments have the ability to adapt. Like the new guardians Hegel wrote about in the early nineteenth century, civil servants are usually able to deal with whatever problem is handed to them by elected (and, in the United States, politically appointed) officeholders. Bureaucracy's scenarios (in anticipation of election outcomes) have been productive and career civil servants have been able to cut into their own flesh (Patrick Dunleavy, Democracy, Bureaucracy and Public Choice: Economic Explanations in Political Science, 1991). As for the wallet, governments are limited by what taxpayers are willing to share. People may not like high marginal tax rates, but the reality is that government cannot do its work without ample revenue. Let us keep in mind that it is skill and will that make government actually perform quite well, despite lack of adequate revenue. Remember, it is only the failures that are newsworthy and reported; we will never read how “once again, government actors have been successful in 98% of their actions.”
A second comment that struck me is that “officials and bureaucrats can wall themselves off from public accountability and feather their own nests” (p. 23; emphasis added). Perhaps elected officeholders have that opportunity, but how many civil servants really do? I know plenty of career civil servants—in the United States and elsewhere—who are not in the business of feathering their own nests.
A third comment puzzled me: The authors call the delegation of tax collection to private revenue agents in ancient Rome and the British East Indian Companies (BEIC) examples of CG. Let us be clear. There is no CG conceivable before the early nineteenth century. Tax farming was widespread until the 1850s and cause for much unrest among the disenfranchised. Most rebellions started as tax revolts. And the BEIC exemplifies how the social, economic, and political elites of the day (one small, happy family) managed to wall off the exploitation of far lands from domestic politics. In fact, those in politics also held positions in corporations such as the BEIC.
When all is said and done, Donahue and Zeckhauser have written an appealing book that, once again, conceives of collaboration as possible. Collaborative Governance targets the world of both practitioners and policy bureaucrats. It is pragmatic, as Associate Justice Stephen Breyer observes in his foreword. The scholarship upon which the book is based cannot be doubted, but the authors first and foremost desired to reach out to the real world by displaying successful and failing efforts at CG. So they believe in its potential, but do not come across as acolytes or salesmen peddling a product. Justice Breyer's final remark is on the mark; the authors are nonideological, while at the same time being idealistic in their message: It is time to recognize that “government is not ‘us vs. them’; rather, government is ‘us and them,’ working together” (p. xiii; emphasis original). The public, nonprofit, and private sectors will need one another to meet on the basis of respect for the strengths of the other. This book's optimism is a delightful step in that direction.
