Elements of Successful Collaboration
Collaboration is seldom spontaneous; it grows and evolves over time. It can be powerful and enduring and lead to achievements that could not otherwise occur. The essence of collaboration is working together to get something done that cannot be done working alone. Collaboration in local government involves working across institutional boundaries to engage outside individuals and entities in a way that reshapes the processes of decision making or service delivery.  

Pervasiveness and Complexity of Collaboration at the Local Level
Nearly every local government in the U.S. has a formal partnership with another city, county, school district, sewer district, college, hospital, business, chamber of commerce or nonprofit agency to get better results for the community. Almost all local governments have undertaken some sort of collaborative process to actively engage citizens, businesses, and community institutions in developing comprehensive or strategic plans and making important decisions.

When collaboration first became common in local government in the 1980s, it tended to occur mostly as bilateral relationships around specific issues, like a city working with a school district to develop a community center for shared use. Multiparty collaboration among local governments tended to focus on singular outcomes, such as mutual aid pacts or development of a local government insurance pool.

Today complex relationships involving multiple partners and various sectors aim at achieving long-term outcomes. Examples of these include:

• Joint ventures  in economic development, commonly involving state, private and community partners
• Watershed agreements among cities, special districts and property owners
• Collaborative justice programs that align  police, courts, prosecutors, parole officers, social workers, churches and foundations  to reduce crime or support and monitor parolees
• Case management systems that link police, hospitals, homeless shelters, housing authorities, safety net clinics, and foundations to address homeless or mental health issues
• Civic initiatives of local governments, businesses, universities and nonprofits to address long-term goals ranging from literacy to medical research
• Regional agencies,  which develop sustained, multi-sector partnerships, such as regional emergency management and communications systems involving dozens of federal, state and local  law enforcement, fire, emergency medical and public health agencies.

This pervasive collaboration and its evolution are due to changes in the environment of local governance. Four broad forces are compelling this collaboration today  and have made collaboration an essential tool of good governance.

• Financial: Less federal and state funding and increased limits on local revenues, in the face of ever greater service demands and public expectations for performance
• Competitive: Cities are part of larger economic and social systems and their competition for economic investment is not internal to regions, but among regions of the world
• Practical: The sheer nature and scale of issues confronting local governments — from traffic management to environmental protection to workforce development — requires strategies that address intertwined economic, environmental and social systems
• Political: Citizens want their public leaders to work together and to exercise effective leadership.

In addition to the pressures for collaboration, there are also four significant barriers to collaboration:

• Structural: Government fragmentation means it is hard to craft collaborative strategies that meet the needs of different jurisdictions and overcome inertia and local identity.  While federal policy is beginning to promote collaboration,   federal aid programs often reinforce traditional service delivery or give deference to state governments, which seldom promote cross-jurisdictional solutions.
• Societal:  Increasing diversity and conflicting values make it difficult to establish a sense of shared responsibility and to find common solutions.
• Process: Developing collaborative relationships is hard and requires a special set of skills and an enormous time commitment that is difficult to sustain
• Leadership: Successful collaboration requires the commitment of leaders at the top of organizations, who often do not have the political freedom, time or skills to engage in collaborative efforts.

In the coming decade local government leaders will be compelled to spend increasing amounts of time, political skills, and resources to support collaborative strategies to guide their communities. They will spend as much time looking outside city hall as inside. Basic service delivery will remain important, but the key drivers of local government will be resource leveraging, community positioning, problem solving, and strategic leadership — all of which require work in tandem and sustained, collaborative partnerships.

Overcoming the Barriers to Successful Collaboration
How well collaboration is achieved at the local level depends on how well participants can address the inherent barriers to collaboration. These are lessons I have learned about what matters in collaboration.

Leadership Matters
Ronald Heifetz and Mary Linsky, Harvard social researchers, make a useful distinction between two types of problems — adaptive problems and technical problems. If a car breaks, a mechanic can fix it; that is a technical problem. However, if the problem stems from the way the car is driven, a behavior change is in order; that is an adaptive problem and is not so easy to fix.

Practitioners often treat adaptive problems as if they are technical problems; for example, balancing a budget by cutting costs across the board rather than making tough choices, rethinking strategies, or repositioning the organization. The latter are behavioral changes.

Typically inherent resistance to adaptive change arises because it may require sacrifice and change in habits. Yet, most of the problems that public officials face are adaptive ones; they require changes in the behavior of systems, relationships and individuals and collaboration over time.

Current notions of leadership need to expand to reflect this reality—leaders need to not only to address technical problems where the objective is clear, but to be equally adept at collaborative leadership that addresses adaptive problems and behavioral changes.

Some key tools of leadership — formal power or authority — cannot be deployed to address adaptive problems. Collaborative efforts, which cross boundaries and embrace diverse values, needs and perspectives, are seldom influenced authority alone.

Collaborative leaders must catalyze, convene, energize, and facilitate others to create visions and solve problems. They must lead not as authority figures but as peer problem solvers to build broad-based involvement among stakeholders. These are not new leadership skills for public managers, but, in the future, they will be the most important. 

Process Matters
Effective collaboration almost always relies on the interaction of stakeholders to find a way forward.  In other words, how participants approach the process of collaboration will determine its success. A good process is the only way to navigate the wide range of expectations and needs that partners bring to the table.

Collaborations don’t just happen — they are engineered and actively managed by using keys to the process.  Scholars and practitioners have worked on identifying key strategies for successful collaboration. The following list of suggested strategies is adapted from the work of David Chrislip (1995)*:

• Launch collaborative efforts with good timing and clear statement of need
• Ensure strong stakeholder groups are engaged
• Ensure broad-based involvement from affected constituencies
• Gain credibility through an open and transparent process
• Secure commitment of high-level, visible leaders
• Secure support/acquiescence of established authorities
• Deal immediately with distrust and skepticism
• Provide strong management and adequate resources to support the process
• Celebrate interim successes
• Help participants shift attention to broader interests and concerns

In my work as a regional practitioner I have found the following specific organizing strategies helpful in building collaboration:

• Use a neutral convener, such as a regional council, chamber of commerce, university or intermediary agency
• Establish shared leadership from multiple key constituencies
• Frame the issue positively to promote dialogue
• Define the goal/need to be addressed before determining the solution
• Clarify guiding  principles early to assist the group in making choices
• Focus on facts, beginning with a strong fact-finding process and an empirical base of information
• Engage positive players to ensure the effort is not dominated by skeptics
• Match resources and expectations to allow sufficient time and staff support to manage the process
• Use public input to support innovation and ensure outcomes are focused on the community rather than the partners
• Interact with or organize community constituencies to support change

Conclusion: Building Trust is the Real Agenda
Collaboration can never be built on sacrifice or loss — it has to find the intersection among self-interests where a unified interest can emerge. Finding that intersection requires trust — a trust built through mutual respect, open communication and an abiding commitment to public interest. The most important aim of local government managers is to build trust — with one another, with citizens and with community institutions.

In an era where government at all levels, and increasingly, local government, which once seemed immune to this trend, is the target of suspicion, mistrust and downright derision, collaboration can be a powerful antidote. Working together creates bonds, both professional and personal, and out of those bonds emerge the seeds of trust. Collaboration is not only the seedbed of trust, it is the hothouse and nursery where trust is nurtured and bears fruit in the form of better outcomes for citizens and communities.