Collaboration as Negotiation: Structuring Organizational Learning in Complex Political Environments

By recognizing that economists use the transaction cost methodology to account for the role of actors engaged in market exchange, this study draws from that insight as a way of delineating various critical factors and outcomes that influence the effectiveness of collaborations in the public sector. While collaboration is not only about making public service delivery more efficient; it also transcends the constant struggle for power and negotiation between agencies, either in a specific policy domain, or in the control over resources or asset-specific programmatic initiatives. As organizations seek the protection of their institutional identity and culture, they also set in motion corresponding processes that work in tandem to create factors which may lead to collaborative inertia. Effective collaboration requires a complementary structural design (governance mechanism) that mitigates many of the disincentives of asymmetry in collaborative processes. As a follow-up to the New Public Management paradigm and its corollary in th