Are there managerial practices associated with the outcomes of an interagency service delivery collaboration? Evidence from British crime and disorder reduction partnerships

Empirical works measuring whether interagency collaborations delivering public services produce better outcomes are few, and none looks inside the black box of collaboration management practices. We examine whether there are collaboration management practices associated with improved performance of Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnerships, an interagency collaboration in England and Wales. These exist in every local authority in England and Wales, so there are enough of them to permit quantitative analysis. And their aim is crime reduction, and crime data over time are available, allowing actual outcomes (rather than outputs, perceptions, or self-reports) to be analyzed longitudinally. We find that there are management practices associated with greater success at reducing crime, but only if applied under bakcground circumstances favorable to collaboration. Those potentially effective collaboration management practices are similar to effective tools for managing any organization: being a good collaboration manager involves good management, period. However, under circumstances unfavorable to collaboration success, performance is worse than it would be if no collaboration had existed at all, suggesting that in some circumstances, setting up a collaboration in the first place is a bad idea.