Poster #29 - Does merging mandated collaborative governance networks improve community-based outcomes?

• In Event: Saturday Poster Luncheon

Abstract

State and federal governments often act as an external authority (mandator) initiating collaboration among other organizations or entities (collaborators) to form a mandated collaborative governance network and achieve its goals (Isett and Miranda 2015; Rodriguez et al. 2007; Sullivan, Yeo, and Kim 2024). Collaborators within the mandated network must work together to address the problem within the area, such as managing watersheds, emergency management, or ending homelessness (An and Tang 2023; Silverstre, Marques, and Gomes 2018). However, mandated collaborations may only focus within their geographic region (Saz-Carranza and Ospina 2011), exhibiting competitive attitudes with organizations in nearby, but separate, collaborations. Therefore, even when mandating collaboration within a network, regional outcomes may suffer from inter-network competition tied to a geographic focus. This competition may further increase niche-seeking by organizations, looking to differentiate themselves to obtain resources and showcase the demand for their services in the community. Yet, while niche-seeking due to competition may fill service gaps, it may leave the network vulnerable due to reduced redundancy, lessening the network’s resilience.

To provide evidence for this ambiguous relationship, we ask the following: 1) how does being geographically close but in separate mandated collaborative governance networks relate with community outcomes? 2) what is the relationship between merging mandated collaborative governance networks and community outcomes? 3) how does service niche in target population and service types moderate these relationships? Specifically, we use the case of homeless services in the United States, where the federal government mandates local service providers to create collaborative governance networks and encourages these networks to merge over time. We additionally study service gaps, having at least one service provider, and redundancy, based on the intersection between the service type – emergency shelter, transitional housing, permanent supportive housing, and rapid rehousing – with the target population of services – single adults, households with children, chronically homeless people, youth, and veterans. We find merging to decrease service provision, but possibly increase death, estimating a non-directed dyadic difference-in-differences design, with stronger effects for service overlap within a dyad. 

Our study contributes to understanding public management and regional collaboration within unconducive environments by offering plausibly causal evidence where incentives for collaboration and competition coexist. The research examines both challenges and opportunities in achieving community-based outcomes through the integration of mandated collaborative governance networks. We study a factor that explains success or failure in generating community-based outcomes for public problems: geographic boundaries as barriers to collaboration and geographic scope more broadly. Last, our study contributes to the study of public management by studying the ideal network structure to achieve outcomes. 

Authors

• Hanvit Kim, University of Central Florida
  Non-Presenting Co-Author

• Andrew Alfred Sullivan, University of Central Florida
  Presenting Author

• Xi Huang, University of Central Florida
  Non-Presenting Co-Author