Call for Articles
Special Issue of Public Performance & Management Review
On
Collaboration and Performance
In the era of collaboration, the public sector increasingly engages in collaborative efforts. Expectations and resources invested in collaborative arrangements rise accordingly, making the issue of collaborative performance to become increasingly salient. The fiscal crisis, demanding strong government steering, regulation and intervention on the one hand, but stressing lean government (in a context of decreasing public budgets) focused on its core tasks on the other hand, adds pressure to the quest for collaborative performance.
Collaborative performance however is a broad concept that entails a variety of arrangements or interactions: within or across governments, involving private actors (profit & non-profit and community groups), focusing on different kinds of activities or results (e.g. information sharing, development, outreach or policy changes), within or across sectors, with varying levels of complexity and studied from various perspectives.
In this volume of PPRM we wish to bring together scholars studying this theme, and build further on work achieved in previous PPRM issuesnotably the special issue on collaborative & network performance published in 2008. More than five years later, we believe it is timely to take stock of new theoretical, methodological and empirical insights.
We welcome articles that deal with the following issues/questions:
- What are different dimensions of collaborative performance (e.g. service delivery, policy development, regime building)?
- What are relevant indicators to monitor and evaluate collaborative dimensions? Which types of indicators, at which levels, and of what nature (qualitative/quantitative)?
- Which theoretical frameworks or perspectives are relevant to study collaborative performance (democratic theory, co-ordination/exchange theory, power-dependency, institutional theory, network theories, discourse theory, or others)?
- What is new empirical evidence of collaborative performance?
- What are relevant evaluation methods & tools? (self-evaluation & self-assessment tools, questionnaires, measurement scales, evaluation process design, audits, or other)?
Articles may focus on monitoring and evaluating performance of different types of collaboration, collaboration at different levels of government (local, regional, national, supranational), public-public and public-private collaboration, intra- and inter-organizational collaboration. Qualitative, quantitative & mixed method approaches are equally welcomed.
Most importantly, articles must bring new insights, develop existing knowledge in more depth or analyze, expand on and summarize relevant literature.
Submission process and due dates
Abstracts should be submitted by May 31, 2013. Authors will be notified by June 30, 2013 whether their proposals have been selected for development as full-blown articles. The due date for final submissions is September 15, 2013. Articles will go through a standard blind peer review process as a requirement for publication in the dedicated volume of PPMR to appear in 2014. Only those articles that survive the double-blind peer review process will be published.
Submissions should be sent electronically to Rosemary O'Leary (oleary@ku.edu) with the subject line: PPMR Special Issue Submission. Questions about appropriate topics and methodology should be directed to any of the special issue coordinators:
Rosemary O'Leary, The University of Kansas USA (oleary@ku.edu)
Catherine Gerard, Syracuse University USA (cgerard@maxwell.syr.edu)
Robyn Keast, Southern Cross University, Australia (robyn.keast@scu.edu.au)
Myrna Mandell, Southern Cross University, Australia (mmandell@csun.edu)
Joris Voets, University of Gent, Belgium (Joris.Voets@UGent.be)