Study IDs what can help collaborative groups actually accomplish their goals

(Press-News.org) Collaborative organizations, involving government agencies, nonprofit groups and other key stakeholders, are often created to address regional challenges such as preserving watersheds – but these organizations often fail to accomplish their stated goals. A new study suggests there is a specific administrative approach that improves the ability of these collaborative groups to deliver the services they were created to provide.

“These organizations tend to do a good job of planning, but then stumble when it comes to transitioning from the planning process to actually executing the projects and processes necessary to implement the plan,” says Graham Ambrose, corresponding author of the study and an assistant professor of public administration at North Carolina State University. “We wanted to learn more about why this happens, and whether there were administrative approaches that could improve implementation for future collaborations.

“Drawing on four case studies and the available literature, we find that groups are more likely to be successful if they adopt something we’ve termed a ‘mixed services transition approach,’” Ambrose says. “This means that groups do not try to jump directly from planning to implementation. Instead, they begin with small scale implementation activities while they are still working to finalize their formal planning – launching pilot projects, taking steps to secure additional funding, and outlining how the collaborative organization’s structure will have to change as the group’s focus shifts increasingly toward implementation.”

For this study, the researchers drew on approximately 30 years of data regarding 31 collaborative organizations that focused on watershed issues in four areas: the Delaware Inland Bays, Narragansett Bay, Tampa Bay and Tillamook Bay.

All the collaborative groups the researchers looked at received funding from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s National Estuary Program, which provides planning grants to organizations that focus on mitigating pollution and preserving estuary ecosystems.

“Many of these groups were unable to successfully transition from planning to implementation, stagnated and were dissolved,” Ambrose says. “Other groups made some headway, and some have proved to be sustainable and resilient. We wanted to see what allowed the resilient organizations to succeed where the others struggled.”

The researchers took two key findings away from the work. The first finding is that collaborations that adopted a mixed services approach were more likely to implement their plans and be resilient than other organizations.

“For example, EPA funding is limited and can only be used for a defined range of projects,” Ambrose says. “In practical terms, this means that some of the goals groups identified in the planning stage would not be eligible for funding. It makes sense that organizations that took steps to secure additional funding were better able to implement their plans, and better able to maintain the interest and goodwill of their stakeholders. By the same token, implementing pilot projects can help identify previously unanticipated challenges or opportunities, which can benefit larger scale implementation efforts later on.”

The second finding has to do with the way researchers have studied collaborative organizations and processes.

“Planning and implementation are different activities, have different end goals, and require different organizational structures and responsibilities,” Ambrose says. “And while a lot of excellent research has been done on what makes planning processes work, and a lot of excellent research has been done on what makes implementation processes work, there has been very little research looking at both of these things within the same organization. And there has been virtually no work on what exactly the transition between planning and implementation looks like.

“As a result, people are drawing on research from the planning process to give advice on best practices for implementation, and vice versa. And the results have been decidedly mixed.

“We think our contribution here is both practical and academic,” Ambrose says. “At a high level, we propose a new way to think about collaboration and governance literatures. But the primary goal of our work here is to offer more consistent and practical advice to practitioners. The advice thus far has been fairly inconsistent – we believe our approach can help address some of those inconsistencies.

“Now that we’ve presented the ‘mixed services transition approach,’ the next step is to further test it. While the proposed approach helps structure our thinking, we believe there are many exciting questions left on the table – particularly connecting governance structure to collaboration context. We’re also interested in examining the specific aspects of collaborations and their contexts that spur successful and unsuccessful transitions.”

The paper, “Transitioning from planning to implementation: comparing collaborative governance and developmental dynamics in 4 watersheds,” is published open access in the journal Policy Sciences. The paper was co-authored by Mark Imperial, an associate professor of public administration at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.

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