ABSTRACT
At the heart of new public governance (NPG) is the notion that partnerships, collaboration, and engagement produce qualitatively better outcomes for communities. What one organization cannot accomplish alone, a network may leverage their collective resources and energy for joint action. Examples of successful and sustained action in chapters 10–11, and 13–14 of this book come from the human services arena, such as Washington County’s Vision Action Network, or the large-scale management of conservation programs. These and other cases generate multiple lessons for public officials but also reflect considerable complexity in understanding the unique dynamics of shared power and governance. This complexity presents challenges for assessing the unique civic infrastructure linkages between the private (for-profit), government, and nonprofit sectors. Moreover, it creates questions about how public managers can assess the capacity of potential network participants to make and sustain commitments. This chapter develops a “civic capacity assessment framework” that can be used by government officials to help them decide which partnerships are more likely to produce sustainable outcomes.
