TY - JOUR
T1 - Public Capacity, Plural Forms of Collaboration, and the Performance of Public Initiatives
T2 - A Configurational Approach
AU - Lazzarini, Sergio G.
AU - Pongeluppe, Leandro S.
AU - Ito, Nobuiuki C.
AU - Oliveira, Felippe de Medeiros
AU - Ovanessoff, Armen
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Public Management Research Association. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.
PY - 2020/10/1
Y1 - 2020/10/1
N2 - We assess conditions that explain plural forms of public and private action using a comparative study of 24 public initiatives in Brazil, India, and South Africa. Measuring performance as evidence of positive outcomes to their target populations, we compare cases of high and low performance. Our configurational approach examines combinations of conditions leading to positive outcomes: public operational capacity, diverse collaborations nurtured by public units (with for-profit firms, with nonprofit organizations, and with other units in the public bureaucracy), and stakeholder orientation (permeability to multiple sources of input to design and adjust the project). We apply fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis to unveil configurations consistent with high performance. Our configurational analysis reveals two distinct paths to high performance. A path with higher private engagement involves concurrent collaborations with for-profit and nonprofit actors, whereas an alternative path with higher internal (public) engagement relies on collaborations within the public bureaucracy complemented by high permeability to inputs from multiple stakeholders. Our results also confirm that strong public capacity is necessary in all high-performance configurations. An important implication is that externalization and multiple forms of collaboration are not substitutes for weak governments. Furthermore, our configurational perspective contributes to the literature by operationalizing a multiple-actor, multiple-logic perspective describing alternative paths to high performance.
AB - We assess conditions that explain plural forms of public and private action using a comparative study of 24 public initiatives in Brazil, India, and South Africa. Measuring performance as evidence of positive outcomes to their target populations, we compare cases of high and low performance. Our configurational approach examines combinations of conditions leading to positive outcomes: public operational capacity, diverse collaborations nurtured by public units (with for-profit firms, with nonprofit organizations, and with other units in the public bureaucracy), and stakeholder orientation (permeability to multiple sources of input to design and adjust the project). We apply fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis to unveil configurations consistent with high performance. Our configurational analysis reveals two distinct paths to high performance. A path with higher private engagement involves concurrent collaborations with for-profit and nonprofit actors, whereas an alternative path with higher internal (public) engagement relies on collaborations within the public bureaucracy complemented by high permeability to inputs from multiple stakeholders. Our results also confirm that strong public capacity is necessary in all high-performance configurations. An important implication is that externalization and multiple forms of collaboration are not substitutes for weak governments. Furthermore, our configurational perspective contributes to the literature by operationalizing a multiple-actor, multiple-logic perspective describing alternative paths to high performance.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85096923811&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1093/jopart/muaa007
DO - 10.1093/jopart/muaa007
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85096923811
SN - 1053-1858
VL - 30
SP - 579
EP - 595
JO - Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory
JF - Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory
IS - 4
ER -