Acceso usuarios
Thaddieus W. Conner
Collaborative partnerships and stakeholder engagement support an exchange of information, ideas, and resources that are critical to successful policy implementation in the 21st century. Such multiorganizational arrangements accompany expectations that collaboration will lead to improved policy outcomes and organizational performance that would not otherwise be possible in more hierarchical settings. However, our knowledge of how collaborative partnerships contribute to the full spectrum of potential impacts ranging from direct substantive outcomes to more indirect process-oriented improvements remains limited. Using data from a unique survey of 150 Indian education directors in New Mexico and Oklahoma, the following study explores how collaboration between public officials and Native American communities is related to perceived improvements in organizational performance across eight different direct and indirect measures. The results demonstrate that higher levels of collaboration are positively related to perceived improvements in direct substantive outcomes for Native American students. However, collaboration has less of an impact on more process-oriented outcomes including improved joint problem solving and cross-cultural learning with stakeholders suggesting the presence of differential effects. This research makes meaningful contributions to our understanding of the diverse impacts of collaboration, and the degree to which stakeholder engagement is related to more positive outcomes in public school districts.
