The Collaborative Public Manager: New Ideas for the Twenty-First Century

Today’s public managers not only have to function as leaders within their agencies, they must also establish and coordinate multi-organizational networks of other public agencies, private contractors, and the public. This important transformation has been the subject of an explosion of research in recent years. The Collaborative Public Manager brings together original contributions by some of today’s top public management and public policy scholars who address cutting-edge issues that affect government managers worldwide. State-of-the-art empirical research reveals why and how public managers collaborate and how they motivate others to do the same. Examining tough issues such as organizational design and performance, resource sharing, and contracting, the contributors draw lessons from real-life situations as they provide tools to meet the challenges of managing conflict within interorganizational, interpersonal networks. This book pushes scholars, students, and professionals to rethink what they know about collaborative public management-and to strive harder to achieve its full potential.

Rosemary O’Leary is Distinguished Professor of Public Administration and Maxwell School Advisory Board Endowed Chair at Syracuse University. She has received ten national research awards and eight teaching awards. She is codirector of the Collaborative Governance Initiative and codirector of the Program on the Analysis and Resolution of Conflicts.

Lisa Blomgren Bingham is Keller-Runden Professor of Public Service at Indiana University’s School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Bloomington. She has received the Association for Conflict Resolution’s Abner Award and the Rubin Theory-to-Practice Award from the International Association for Conflict Management and the Harvard Project on Negotiation.