ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the central issues of Collaboration in Public Services. It has emphasized, its premise that public sector reforms have changed the structures and processes by which government is delivered and that, in particular, these changes have often been operationalized by the introduction or enhancement of collaborative mechanisms of delivery. The chapter explains some of these developments in Europe, Israel and North America. It explores the collaborative government and its mechanisms in greater detail, outlining some of the various contemporary manifestations of these as policy instruments and the problems of transplanting them into different political and social contexts. The chapter examines evaluation and offers some preliminary thoughts on the adequacy of evaluative mechanisms to cope with what many see as new and demanding challenges. It offers an overview of the manifestations of collaboration and evaluation and sets out some of the relationships between them. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
