Brian An, assistant professor in the School of Public Policy, recently published an article in the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory. The article is titled “When Agency Priorities Matter: Risk Aversion for Autonomy and Turf Protection in Mandated Collaboration.”

In it, An and co-author Shui-Yan Tang discuss the vertical dimension of collaborative efforts, or which actors are involved and the scope of the collaboration itself. They use the implementation of the 2014 California Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, which mandated that local agencies work together.

“The analyses consistently show that agencies are more likely to commit to regionally integrated collaboration that matches the scale of a groundwater basin if (1) their mission addresses a broader issue focus (lower issue specificity), (2) their core stakeholder groups have less concentrated interests, and (3) the organizational culture is less rigid and risk averse,” the authors write.

The full article is available at https://doi.org/10.1093/jopart/muac014.