Effectiveness in Local Government-NGO Collaboration: Assessing Key Determinants

• In Event: Networks and Collaboration

Abstract

The New Public Management (NPM) movement in the 1980s challenged public organizations to follow the private sector lead in focusing on performance, service improvement and quality, and market-based solutions (Rainey 2014). Nonprofit organizations were not exempt from the effects of NPM, and these organizations were challenged to compete in markets that blurred sectoral boundaries and created new organizational constraints (Renz 2010). Collaboration, or collaborative governance, provided nonprofits with the opportunity to partner with public organizations to enhance competitiveness and organizational capacity and to “to solve problems that cannot be solved or easily solved…” alone (O’Leary et al., p. 7, 2006).

To assess the performance of their relationships, collaborating organizations increasingly rely on evidence-based results (Renz 2010). Nonprofits are challenged to operate effectively in collaborations to further not only the goals of the collaborative, but also their own organization goals. The collaboration and nonprofit literatures are replete with factors and propositions theorized to create goal achievement in collaboration (see Bryson et al. 2006, Emerson & Nabatchi 2015, Emerson et al. 2012, Gazley 2010, O’Leary & Vij 2012, Renz 2010; Andrews and Entwistle 2010; Getha-Taylor et al 2018), but more focus is needed on empirically testing the factors and propositions found in the literature, and on the overall effectiveness of these arrangements. Doing this will provide nonprofits and other collaborative partners with empirically grounded research they can use to increase their level of goal achievement in collaboration.

This proposed study seeks to address this need. Primary data collected by a research team will be analyzed to gain a better understanding of how theorized propositions of successful collaboration unfold in a local government-NGO context. Relying on 471 surveys of local government and NGO officials in Lebanon, the study assesses collaboration performance, and how it is affected by contextual, organizational, managerial, and other theoretically relevant variables. In the process, the study also offers insights into local government-NGO collaborative dynamics in developing countries, in addition to how those relationships are applicable in a global context.

Works Cited

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Authors

• Zachary Bauer

• Long Tran, American University

• Jocelyn M. Johnston, American University

• Khaldoun AbouAssi, American University- School of Public Affairs