If it ain't broke, don't fix it: When collaborative public management becomes collaborative excess

• Published date: 01 November 2023
• Author: Thomas Elston,Germà Bel,Han Wang
• Date: 01 November 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13708

RESEARCH ARTICLE

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it: When collaborative public

management becomes collaborative excess

Thomas Elston

1

| Germà Bel

2

| Han Wang

1

1

Blavatnik School of Government, University of

Oxford, Oxford, UK

2

School of Economics, Universitat de Barcelona,

Barcelona, Spain

Correspondence

Thomas Elston, Blavatnik School of Government,

University of Oxford, Radcliffe Observatory

Quarter, Oxford OX2 6GG, UK.

Email: thomas.elston@bsg.ox.ac.uk

Funding information

Economic and Social Research Council:

Rebuilding Macroeconomics Network,

Grant/Award Number: R00787X/1

Abstract

Collaboration is a commonly prescribed method of public service improvement.

If collaboration fails, blame is typically ascribed to transaction costs, organiza-

tional inertia, or premature evaluation. However, drawing on a notable case of

collaborative failure in England, we show that misdiagnosing public service prob-

lems as being of a type likely to be cured by joint working can also generate poor

results, and belongs conceptually prior to many “go-to”explanations of failure.

Using stacked difference-in-difference estimators on 11 years of performance

data relating to subnational tax administration, we show that inter-municipal

cooperation produced no cost or quality improvements in the administration of

this public service, contrary to reformer expectations. Supplementary testing

attributes this failure less to governance problems, inertia, or precipitate evalua-

tion than to a basic lack of interdependence—the specific “problem”to which

collaboration is the “solution”—between partnering councils. Having already

exhausted scale economies internally, partners experienced no mutual reli ance

warranting their attempt to further economize through collaborative tax admin-

istration.

Evidence for practice

•Inter-organizational collaboration can improve public service performance only

in situations of material interdependence, in which unilateral action by single

organizations is unable to deliver desired goals.

•When external interdependence is present but weak, the costs of establishing

and operating inter-organizational collaborations may still outweigh the

benefits.

•In the case of inter-municipal cooperation (also known as “shared services”),

interdependence can be estimated from the relation between municipal size

and service costs. When doubling municipal size is associated with less than

doubling of service costs, economies of scale are present. The further a

municipality is from the revealed optimal size, the greater its dependence on

others to achieve efficiency gains through collaborative up-scaling.

•Where interdependence is non-existent or immaterial, organizations should

resist pressures from stakeholders to adopt inappropriate collaborative solutions

for their image-enhancing or “feel-good”effects.

Received: 13 January 2023 Revised: 17 July 2023 Accepted: 17 July 2023

DOI: 10.1111/puar.13708

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribu tion and reproduction in any medium, provided the

original work is properly cited.

© 2023 The Authors. Public Administration Review published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of American Society for Public Administration.

Public Admin Rev. 2023;83:1737–1760. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/puar 1737

[Often] there is a stress on interdependence where in

fact none exists. …Agency personnel meet with each

other and attempt to coordinate their activities when

…there is not sufficient interdependence to

warrant it.

–Litwak and Rothman (1970), Towards the Theory

and Practice of Coordination between Formal

Organizations

INTRODUCTION

Increasing the quantity and quality of joint working

among agencies responsible for delivering public ser-

vices must be among the most oft-repeated of recom-

mendations directed at governments, the world over

(Molenveld et al., 2020;Peters,2015;Treinetal.,2019).

Few of us would struggle to name instances of ineffec-

tive “join up”based on our own first-hand experience

of government services. And it is hard to imagine how

many of the biggest public and social policy chal-

lenges facing societies today—inequality, care for the

elderly, crime reduction, and offender rehabilitation—

could be tackled without integrated effort from a

whole panoply of actors. So it is that collaborative

public management has become “the smart thing to

do and the right thing to do”(Stout & Keast, 2021,

p. 17), and has assumed pole position as “the predom-

inant approach to solving complex public problems”

(Silvia, 2018, p. 472).

Nonetheless, poor integration of disparate organiza-

tional or sectoral efforts is but one of many categories of

public management challenges. Even when flawlessly

executed, therefore, collaboration provides no universal

fix-all for public service problems (Huxham &

Vangen, 2005;O’Flynn, 2008). Rather, policy interven-

tions need to be closely “fitted”to particular problems,

although this is easier said than done. Means-ends

uncertainty pervades organizations (March &

Olsen, 1976), and analytic capacity is often scarce. Com-

pelling “solutions”may present themselves even before

problems are identified or understood (Cohen et al.,

1972). And pressures for isomorphic adoption of popular

(if unproven) management practices, or for symbolic pol-

icymaking in pursuit of legitimacy, can be considerable

(Ashworth et al., 2009; Campbell, 2021).

In the specific case of collaborative public manage-

ment, therefore, while much research has rightly sought

to explain situations of under-collaboration, or “collabora-

tion gaps”(Hamilton et al., 2021), in which social cost

arises from a lack of coordination between interdepen-

dent parties, the converse situation of over-collabora-

tion—or collaborative excess—cannot be dismissed as a

mere logical possibility. Rather, imperfections in decision-

making about public management reforms mean that

multi-agency collaboration instigated as a wrongful solu-

tion, without there being meaningful interdependence

between partners, is a wholly realistic prospect (as Litwak

and Rothman noted long ago)—and one deserving of far

greater research attention.

Accordingly, in this article, we enumerate some condi-

tions that might facilitate collaborative excess, and then

demonstrate the value of being attuned to this possibility

by showing how the demonstrable absence of interde-

pendence helps explain collaborative failure when other,

more orthodox explanations prove insufficient. Using

stacked difference-in-difference estimators on 11 years of

performance data relating to subnational tax collection in

England, we show that inter-municipal cooperation pro-

duced no cost or quality improvements over independent

service delivery, contrary to the expectations of reformers.

Supplementary testing attributes this failure less to com-

plex governance, organizational inertia, or precipitate

evaluation (all prominent themes in existing literature)

than to a basic lack of interdependence—the specific

problem to which collaboration is the solution—between

England’s already super-sized local councils. Having

exhausted economies of scale internally, partners experi-

enced no mutual reliance on one another warranting their

attempt to further economize through collaboration. In

short, collaboration failed to “fix”services that were not

“broken”in the first place, yet imposed significant disrup-

tion along the way.

THE ALLURE OF COLLABORATION

At least four conditions may give rise to collaborative

excess.

First is that interdependence between two or more

organizations, whereby attaining mutually-desired out-

comes or avoiding mutually-damaging externalities is

contingent on each other’s behavior, is extremely com-

mon in the public sector (Bingham & O’Leary, 2008;

Peters, 2015). Moreover, interdependence is likely to be

increasing due to globalization, changing societal expec-

tations, and the growing specialization of work and orga-

nizations (Eriksson et al., 2020;O’Toole, 1997). Agranoff

and McGuire (2003, pp. 2, vii) thus speak of “the ubiquity

of interdependence,”and of “the era of the manager’s

cross-boundary interdependency challenge.”In such a con-

text, instigating more collaboration may be regarded as a

“safe bet”for securing public service improvements—

without the need for more thorough analysis of the true

root causes of performance problems.

Second is the ease with which instances of defective

policy integration can be recalled by service users, man-

agers, and commentators alike, and the effect this has on

judgments and generalizations about public service

improvement. From poor data sharing across bureaucratic

silos, to incoherent responses to “wicked issues”like pov-

erty and recidivism, examples of government action mani-

foldly in need of greater join up are told and retold

without hesitation (Peters, 2015). However, ease of

1738 WHEN COLLABORATIVE PUBLIC MANAGEMENT BECOMES COLLABORATIVE EXCESS