Developing collaborative advantage in public sector

Public sector organisations collaborate to achieve ‘collaborative advantage’ but practical experience is often ‘collaborative inertia’. Public sector literature has focused on collaborations and not on the participant organisations involved in such collaboration. This paper aims to contribute to filling this gap. An exploratory case study is used for an English ambulance service. Empirical evidence is found that the processes associated with ‘alliance management capability’ identified from private sector research also characterise collaborative capability in the public sector. The role of government leads to differences in the way these processes are enacted, thus, impacting on collaborative capability and either resulting in collaborative advantage or inertia