Collaborating to Manage: A Primer for the Public Sector

Collaborating to Manage captures the basic ideas and approaches to public management in an era where government must partner with external organizations as well as other agencies to work together to solve difficult public problems. In this primer, Robert Agranoff examines current and emergent approaches and techniques in intergovernmental grants and regulation management, purchase-of-service contracting, networking, public/nonprofit partnerships and other lateral arrangements in the context of the changing public agency. As he steers the reader through various ways of coping with such organizational richness, Agranoff offers a deeper look at public management in an era of shared public program responsibility within governance.

Geared toward professionals working with the new bureaucracy and for students who will pursue careers in the public or non-profit sectors, Collaborating to Manage is a student-friendly book that contains many examples of real-world practices, lessons from successful cases, and summaries of key principles for collaborative public management.

Robert Agranoff is professor emeritus in the School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University-Bloomington and is affiliated with the Instituto Universitario Ortega y Gasset in Madrid. He is the author of Managing within Networks and coauthor of Collaborative Public Management, which received the Louis Brownlow Book Award from the National Academy of Public Administration.