Producing Human Services: Why Do Agencies Collaborate?

Belief in the resource-saving and service-enhancing potential of inter-organizational collaboration has become virtually an article of faith among resource providers, client advocates, and service planners. Yet collaboration in practice encounters myriad difficulties, and successful collaborations seem to be relatively rare. In this paper, we focus on providers’ incentives to collaborate: why might a provider decide to reallocate effort away from independent service provision toward collaboration in service provision? We argue that careful consideration of these incentives, framed by theory, can help sponsors of collaboration to avoid choosing governance mechanisms that are likely to fail, and select instead those mechanisms with the best chances of success under the circumstances they confront.