ABSTRACT
Collaboration has emerged in recent years not only as a critically important feature of public management in the United States (O’Leary and Bingham 2009), but also as a reflection of a lasting “trend in the global community” (Koteen 1997: 12). Indeed, the growing complexity of contemporary social issues, dispersed expertise to address them, technological innovations, administrative fragmentation, and overlapping jurisdictions, among other factors, appear to have rendered collaborative arrangements indispensable to our present-day practice of governance worldwide (McGuire 2006). “If the 20th century was the era of the administrative state,” Koontz and Thomas assert, “then the 21st century may be the era of the collaborative state” (2006: 111).
