To the summit and beyond: Tracing the process and impact of collaborative performance summits

• Published date: 01 September 2023
• Author: Scott Douglas,Chris Ansell
• Date: 01 September 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13598

RESEARCH ARTICLE

To the summit and beyond: Tracing the process and impact

of collaborative performance summits

Scott Douglas

1

| Chris Ansell

2

1

Utrecht School of Governance, Utrecht

University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

2

Charles and Louise Travers Department of

Political Science, UC Berkeley, Berkeley,

California, USA

Correspondence

Scott Douglas, Utrecht School of Governance,

Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands.

Email: s.c.douglas@uu.nl

Funding information

Idea Generator, Grant/Award Number:

NWA.1228.192.190

Abstract

Interactive routines such as collaborative performance summits are thought to

help collaborating organizations assess and improve their performance. How-

ever, there is little systematic evidencetosubstantiatethisclaim.Thisstudy

leverages a longitudinal dataset to examine the summit process and identify the

difference between summits that have an impact on performance and those that

do not. The study explicates the assumed causal process and traces 18 partner-

ships as they prepare, conduct, and follow-up a summit. The analysis provides

evidence for the positive impact of summits, but also shows that the process

unfolds differently than expected. Neither the range of performance issues that

actors bring to the summit nor the intentions for change they formulate at the

end of the meeting are key differentiators. The hallmark of impactful summits

emerges to be a large share of participants gaining comprehensive insights.

These findings have implications for collaborative performance management

research and practice.

Evidence for practice

•Researchers argue that organizing collaborative performance summits could

help the partners in a collaboration to better understand and improve their joint

performance.

•This study of organizations collaborating on literacy programs explores the

difference between summits that do or do not lead to performance

improvement.

•The key characteristic of impactful summits is that a large share of participants

report learning about the full breadth of the performance of the collaboration.

•To achieve this collective learning, summits should not be approached as purely

technocratic information exchanges, but rather as interactive learning

opportunities.

•The current study focuses specifically on the characteristics of the summit pro-

cess itself, practitioners preparing summits will have to consider the characteris-

tics of the wider collaboration to determine what type of summit will work best

in their context.

INTRODUCTION

Addressing the causes and consequences of a myriad of soci-

etal challenges—such as climate change, poverty, or

pandemics—requires close collaboration between public, pri-

vate, and community organizations (Head & Alford, 2015).

However, collaborating actors often struggle to get a grip on

their collective performance, making it hard for them to

assess their current progress and identify steps toward future

improvement (Emerson & Nabatchi, 2015; Kroll, 2002).

Problems associated with performance management

in the public sector in general—such as the difficulty of

Received: 14 March 2022 Revised: 7 December 2022 Accepted: 13 December 2022

DOI: 10.1111/puar.13598

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.

1108 Public Admin Rev. 2023;83:1108–1122.

wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/puar