COLLABORATING TO MANAGE: A PRIMER FOR THE PUBLIC SECTOR
| Published date | 01 September 2014 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12103 |
| Author | Paul 't Hart |
| Date | 01 September 2014 |
REVIEWS 763
COLLABORATING TO MANAGE: A PRIMER FOR THE PUBLIC SECTOR
Robert Agranoff
Georgetown University Press, 2012, 288 pp., £18.95 (pb), ISBN: 9781589019164
It is perhaps the most robust public sector change imperative of the last few decades: the
growing complexity and interdependence of public policymaking, public problem solv-
ing, or – in modern parlance – public value creation. The problems that are most worth
tackling yet are also the most intransigent: they transcend jurisdictional and sectoral
boundaries and defy standard repertoires and knowledge claims. Yet at the same time
our public problem-solving ambitions, whether fuelled by ideology, political expediency,
commercial instincts, or commitment to clienteles have hardly diminished in the face of
decades of evidence documenting how hard it really is to devise, implement, and steward
effective public programmes.
So the battle goes on. What we know is that the government cannot address these
intractable problems alone and expect to have a meaningful impact. It needs to
work in alignment with parties in the private and non-prot sectors that have criti-
cal knowledge, systems, legitimacy, and other problem-solving resources. Moreover,
the government itself is a highly differentiated and multi-layered creature, and if its
internal processes are not carefully aligned, its organizational silos, intergovernmental
tensions, and bureau-political strife will cripple the coherence and effectiveness of its
efforts.
All this we have known for some time. But it has only been in the last two decades
or so that we have been working through its implications, in both the practice and the
study of public administration. In practice, we have seen a global urry of efforts to
coordinate, join up, buy in, and partner across agencies, levels of government, and out
to the private and non-prot sectors. In the study of public administration this quest
has been observed, interpreted, and indeed actively advocated and enabled by schol-
ars of ‘governance’, ‘network management’, and most recently, ‘collaborative public
management’.
Robert Agranoff has been at the forefront of this development for most of this time. A
prize-winning scholar (including the Haldane prize awarded by this journal), he has seen
it all, studied it diligently,and has published about it in an impressive series of books and
articles. The present book can be seen as an attempt to take all that work, synthesize it,
and present it to, as the Preface says, ‘professionals who work within and with the new,
externally as well as internally geared bureaucracy – the “conductive” public agency and
for students who are pursuing or will pursue careers on one or the other side of public
programs in the network area’.
By that measure, the book is not a success. This is not because Agranoff does not know
his business. On the contrary,he might just know it a bit too well, and has found it difcult
to suppress the tendency to take his readers to all the nooks and crannies of his thinking
about the subject. As a result, the book is overly dense (note the complexity of the sen-
tence from the Preface, which provides the shape of things to come in the main text), lacks
a tight and compelling composition (it is, and still feels like, a collection of papers and
lectures), and has the awkward tendency to provide endless multi-item checklists, pre-
sumably under the misguided assumption that this is what practitioners want and how
they learn.
Public Administration Vol.92, No. 3, 2014 (761–768)
© 2014 John Wiley& Sons Ltd.
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