Governing Cross-Sector Collaboration

Chapter TwoThe Rationale for Cross-Sector Collaboration

In Shrinking the State (1998), Feigenbaum, Henig, and Hamnett classified rationales for approaches to privatization under three broad categories: pragmatic, tactical, and strategic. This chapter outlines a similar set of rationales for why public, nonprofit, and private sector managers might want to engage in cross-sector collaboration (CSC). The three rationales are pragmatic, economic, and strategic. Thus, some CSCs occur for very pragmatic reasons—perhaps a public problem or service delivery issue that cannot be easily solved by one sector, so finding collaborators in another sector makes sense. There also are some sound economic reasons for CSC that revolve around the concept of comparative ...