Are There Managerial Practices Associated with Service Delivery Collaboration Success? Evidence from British Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnerships. HKS Faculty Research Working Paper Series. John F. Kennedy School of Government or

Empirical works measuring whether interagency collaborations delivering public services produce better outcomes are few, and none looks inside the black box of collaboration management practices. We examine whether there are collaboration management prac-tices associated with improved performance of Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnerships, an interagency collaboration in England and Wales. These exist in every local authority in England and Wales, so there are enough of them to permit quantitative analysis. And their aim is crime reduction, and crime data over time are available, allowing actual outcomes (rather than outputs, perceptions, or self-reports) to be analyzed longitudinally. We find that there are management practices associated with greater success at reducing crime, but only if applied under bakcground circumstances favorable to collaboration. Those poten-tially effective collaboration management practices are similar to effective tools for manag-ing any organization: being a good collaboration manager involves good management, period. However, under circumstances unfavorable to collaboration success, performance is worse than it would be if no collaboration had existed at all, suggesting that in som