Reduced‐Boundary Governance: The Advantages of Working Together

• Author: R. Paul Battaglio,Jeremy L. Hall
• Published date: 01 July 2018
• Date: 01 July 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12965

Reduced-Boundary Governance: TheAdvantagesofWorkingTogether 499

Going it alone is not always the best policy. Sure,

there are mavericks out there who prefer to do

things their way. We have certainly witnessed a

transition of U.S. foreign policy in recent months away

from global cooperation and back toward a platform of

greater isolationism—symbolically if not substantively.

As co-editors of Public Administration Review (PAR),

we recognize the greater potential for gains that can

come from working together and combining strengths

to manage the journal. Indeed, if you skim the pages

of most academic journals—especially those in public

administration—it is increasingly rare to find single-

authored manuscripts. Scholars combine their expertise

to realize developments in the field that may not have

been possible individually. When it comes to public

administration and management, however, the issue of

political control is more often tempered with a need for

effectiveness and efficiency. Citizens and stakeholders

want agencies and programs that are accountable to

their defined goals. While politicians measure success

in votes, for professional public managers, agency and

program performance is a key mantra. Managers must

attend to citizen and stakeholder demands for agency

responsiveness while balancing the guiding hand of

their political principals. These demands often translate

roughly into “doing more with less.”

Collaboration, cooperation, and coproduction are all

approaches that reflect the realization that creative

solutions look beyond traditional, organizational,

and structural boundaries to overcome various

capacity deficiencies while working toward shared

goals. Capacity has been central to our understanding

of agency performance for decades (Weber and

Khademian 2008). The regional commissions formed

in response to the Public Works and Economic

Development Act of 1965 were intended to provide

the technical capacity that was lacking in resource-

poor, professionally weak local governments, and to

facilitate working across geographic boundaries to

address regional problems. States rapidly promulgated

new regional commissions that were able to work

with local governments as active or passive partners,

bridging the capacity gap and facilitating improved

local public services. We have come a long way

since then; states must work together on important

infrastructure projects that transcend their boundaries

(like the Ohio River bridge project between Louisville,

KY, and southern Indiana), and international

cooperation is necessary to cope with crises and

natural disasters (Christensen, Lægreid, and Rykkja

2016). Moreover, governments now hollowed out

like a rich seam from a coal mine must rely on the

technical expertise and resources of private firms and

nonprofit organizations to deliver key services.

Public administration scholarship began to focus on

the relationship of capacity to performance around

1980 (Gargan 1981; Honadle 1981). Measurement

and statistical analysis are always better at dealing

with the presence of things rather than their absence,

so focus has naturally been on the positive effects

of capacity rather than the absence thereof. The

capacity/performance paradigm is often clouded by

the shifting realities of day-to-day management: there

is no guarantee of performance even when sufficient

capacity is in place. It all depends on how that capacity

is brought to bear on the problem, what external

factors emerge to shape or reshape political and agency

legitimacy, and changes to the problem itself.

Some research has explored capacity/performance

relationships directly. Hou, Moynihan and Ingraham

(2003), for example, considered the linkages between

capacity, management, and performance. Hall (2007)

measured state innovation capacity as a predictor of

state economic development performance, and later

developed a measure of local government capacity to

leverage federal grant funding (Hall 2008). This latter

study begins to bridge the study of intergovernmental

capacity to address stated goals. Sometimes the effects

are not as intended; Hall (2010) learned that locations

with lower capacity levels were buying their way

into federal grants with debt while higher capacity

locations were cherry picking programs with low or

no match rates.

Jeremy L. Hall

University of Central Florida

R. Paul Battaglio

The University of Texas at Dallas

Reduced-Boundary Governance:

The Advantages of Working Together

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 78, Iss. 4, pp. 499–501. © 2018 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.12965.

Editorial