Managing the Performance of Public Sector Collaborations: A Literature Synthesis using Examples from the Law Enforcement Domain
article
Public sector agencies increasingly seek to collaborate with other public and private organizations. These collaborations operate outside of traditional organizational boundaries, raising new questions regarding performance management. Using illustrative examples from the law enforcement domain, this article aims to synthesize the main findings of the existing literature on performance management in collaborative governance settings, highlight current knowledge gaps and identify key ways forward for research and practice. As part of the synthesis, we identify a range of performance management challenges that collaborations face, which we cluster into three categories: substantive problem-solving challenges, collaborative process challenges, and multi-relational accountability challenges. We place these challenges along the collaborative process and performance management life cycles that collaborations go through and describe ways to deal with them as discussed in the literature. Based on the synthesis, we identify two knowledge gaps in dealing with the collaborative performance management challenges: both the underlying causes of these challenges and the possible ways to overcome them remain underexplored. Our synthesis results in two key avenues for further research: case studies to refine our understanding of challenges’ underlying causes, and action research in combination with field experiments to develop and test possible performance management interventions.
TNO Identifier
861927
Source
TiREG Working Papers no. 1(december)
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