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This paper offers practical insights for public managers as they work within interorganizational networks. It is based on the author's empirical study of 14 networks involving federal, state, and local government managers working with nongovernmental organizations. The findings suggest that networks are hardly crowding out the role of public agencies; though they are limited in their decision scope, they can add collaborative public value when approaching nettlesome policy and program problems.
It is time to go beyond heralding the importance of networks as a form of collaborative public management and look inside their operations. At this point in the development of the field, it is well known (1) that "the age of the network" has arrived (Lipnack and Stamps 1994), (2) that hierarchy and markets are being supplemented by networks (Powell 1990), (3) that public managers are enmeshed in a series of collaborative horizontal and vertical networks (Agranoff and McGuire 2003), and (4) that networks need to be treated seriously in public administration (O'Toole 1997). If this form of organizing is so important to public managers, why not study it in the same sense that hierarchical organization or human resources or the budget process is examined? That is what this article addresses, taking a deeper look into how public networks are organized and how they are managed. It offers some empirically based experiences, addressing 10 important features of collaborative management.
The issues raised here are based on a study of the operations of 14 public management networks in the central states, comprising federal, state, regional, and local government officials and nongovernmental managers-that is, officers from nonprofits, for-profits, universities, and other organizations (Agranoff, forthcoming). Such networks can be chartered (organized by some formal mechanism as an intergovernmental agreement or by statutory action) or nonchartered (informal in legal status but equally permanent, organized, and mission oriented). These networks are interorganizational (Alter and Hage 1998) and should be distinguished from social networks, which involve "studied nodes linked by social relationships" (Laumann, Galaskiewicz, and Marsden 1978) or recurring relationships (Nohria 1992), both within and outside organizations, for which there is an already developed rich tradition (Burt 1992; Granovetter 1973; White 1992). Public management networks are, in every sense, collaborative connections like social networks, although they not only comprise...