When Collaboration Is Risky Business: The Influence of Collaboration Risks on Formal and Informal Collaboration

• Author: Richard C. Feiock,Jessica N. Terman,Jisun Youm
• DOI: 10.1177/0275074019867421
• Date: 01 January 2020
• Published date: 01 January 2020
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0275074019867421

American Review of Public Administration

2020, Vol. 50(1) 33 –44

© The Author(s) 2019

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DOI: 10.1177/0275074019867421

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Article

Introduction

The last two decades have seen tremendous strides in local

government involvement in energy efficiency and conserva-

tion efforts. As the benefits of these policies (i.e., cleaner air,

less congestion, etc.) are often indirect and perceived as dis-

persed and costly (Krause, Feiock, & Hawkins, 2016), they

can be politically unpalatable in some communities. In an

attempt to mitigate these challenges by more evenly distrib-

uting the costs and benefits of these policies, localities often

consider collaborating with one another. This collaboration

allows for economies of scale and the potential for reduced

negative externalities. However, the decision to collaborate

poses considerable risks (Feiock, 2013). These risks can be

magnified or mitigated by the mechanisms through which

collaboration occurs. In this study, we investigate transaction

risks in formal and informal collaboration in the area of

energy efficiency and conservation.

Our study makes a number of contributions. First, we

have a unique dataset that allows us to test both informal and

formal collaboration and compare them with one another

using separate models. Second, we use the literatures on gov-

ernment collaboration more broadly and institutional collec-

tive action (ICA) frameworks to integrate a model that looks

at collaboration risk, specifically focusing on coordination,

division, and defection risk. Third, this is one of the first

studies to operationalize these risks and test them against the

likelihood of formal and informal coordination. Fourth, we

believe that this is the beginning of a new research agenda

aimed at understanding the risks and benefits of various

forms of collaboration in the public sector. The risk of

informal collaboration can be greater than those of formal

collaboration, but formal collaboration can also be a hand-

cuff because of its inflexibility. We unpack the aforemen-

tioned contributions in the sections that follow.

The organization of this study is as follows. The next section

reviews the intergovernmental collaboration literature to iden-

tify the theoretical and empirical contributions of this study.

This is followed by sections delineating the risks of collabora-

tion, as discussed in the ICA framework, and how factors

related to collaboration risks influence formal and informal

collaboration. We offer hypotheses linking the mitigation of

collaboration risk to the likelihoods of formal and informal col-

laboration. The following sections describe the research design

and present the results of the analysis. We close with a discus-

sion that revisits the collaboration literature to draw implica-

tions from our findings for future research directions.

Government Collaboration in the

Literature

Collaboration is often assumed to produce important bene-

fits such as the lessening of negative externalities and the

867421ARPXXX10.1177/0275074019867421The American Review of Public AdministrationTerman et al.

research-article2019

1George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA

2Florida State University, Tallahassee, USA

3University of Colorado Denver, USA

Corresponding Author:

Jessica N. Terman, George Mason University, 4400 University Drive,

Fairfax, VA 22030, USA.

Email: Jterman@gmu.edu

When Collaboration Is Risky Business:

The Influence of Collaboration Risks

on Formal and Informal Collaboration

Jessica N. Terman1, Richard C. Feiock2, and Jisun Youm3

Abstract

In the last two decades, local governments have increasingly engaged in energy conservation and sustainability programs and

policy. However, the benefits of these policies (i.e., cleaner air, less congestion, etc.) are often perceived as dispersed and

costly. As such, localities consider collaborating with one another. However, decisions to collaborate pose considerable risks

that can be magnified or mitigated by the mechanisms through which collaboration occurs. We investigate decisions to engage

in formal and informal collaboration in the area of energy efficiency and conservation as a response to collaboration risks.

Keywords

intergovernmental collaboration, energy efficiency, institutional collective action