For anybody who has any experience in public life, either as a politician or official, or in the private sector working on government contracts, Collaborative Governance by John Donahue and Richard Zeckhauser is an interesting read. It looks at how to navigate the boundary between an activity wholly carried out by the government (national or local), one simply contracted out to the private sector, and public-private interaction in delivering more complex outcomes – this latter is what they mean by 'collaborative'.
The boundary between state and private sector is obviously fluid and dependent on political preferences and accidents of history. There is no single 'right' place to draw it. As the authors note, democratic governments have a unique legitimacy in aggregating citizens' individual interests but in circumstances of complexity where the flow of fine-grained information is important, the private sector will sometimes have the advantage in terms of delivering effectively. Their ideal collaboration has the government set goals for outcomes and work in close partnership with a private organisation for their delivery. When it works, collaborative governance can bring in the productivity, information and also resource advantages of the private sector to deliver public value.
They don't pretend this is easy. On the contrary, they note that private companies can distort activities in order to increase their own financial rewards. They argue that often too little attention is paid to governance arrangements and that collaborative partnerships mean more rather than less work for the government officials involved. However, they argue that governments should try because of their legitimacy in determining what creates public value. They are rightly dismissive of 'corporate social responsibility' as a contradiction in terms – corporations should not be expected to have public aims.
Interestingly, the examples of local government in the US show a huge variety of choices being made by different municipal authorities in terms of their relationships with the private sector. It's not clear what drives these choices. I think the authors pay too little attention to the role the public can play directly in determining how different services should be run. If government authorities lack enough information to undertake activities themselves, one source of information is direct consultation with voters. This 'process justice' is an essential part of creating public value (as I argued in Public Value in Practice).
A final quibble – this is a book about the United States which does limit its interest for non-Americans. The discussion of charter schools has some relevance for the UK now but a lot of the examples are less relevant. Nevertheless, there's plenty of interest in the general discussion for policy wonks everywhere.
