Conflict in cross-sector partnerships

Abstract

Cross-sector partnerships that bring the public, private sectors, and NGO sectors together to solve problems have become common in arenas including education, urban renewal, research, criminal justice, healthcare, job training, and environmental protection.While many kinds of interactions link these sectors of society, our focus in this chapter is on those that are governed by collaborative or network relations rather than market-based or hierarchical relations (Powell, 1990).We define cross-sector partnerships as dynamic interactions of voluntary participants around shared interests, which stand in contrast to relationships constructed around purely contractual exchange relationships in which one party provides services for another. For example, a nonprofit agency may be retained by a city government to provide shelter,meals, and mental health services for the homeless, but this falls outside our definition of cross-sector partnerships.However, a crosssector partnership would exist if nonprofit agencies and city leaders jointly developed and implemented a plan to alleviate the problem of homelessness. In this case, the partners engage in a reciprocal interaction that may involve joint information sharing and/or action taking. Bingham (2008) refers to this kind of cross-sector partnership as “governance” and notes that it “may involve multiple organizations and stakeholders from public, private, and nonprofit sectors that combine in a network to address a common and shared problem” (p. 274).Wood and Gray (1991: 11) provide a similar definition of collaborative partnerships but one that emphasizes the processual aspects of partnerships defining collaboration as occurring when “a group of autonomous stakeholders of a problem domain engage in an interactive process using shared rules, norms, and structures, to act or decide on issues related to that domain.” Problem domains refer to issues that involve many stakeholders.We believe that identifying a shared problem andattending to the process dynamics of partnership formation and maintenance are both critical for successful partnering. Cross-sectoral partnerships may be formed for many different reasons.Theseinclude managing uncertainty or turbulence within a domain (Trist, 1983; Gray, 1989), pooling scarce resources to tackle societal problems (Gray, 1989; Huxham andVangen, 2005), gaining collaborative advantage within an industry or network (Huxham andVangen,2005), providing public services (Sandfort and Milward,2008), gaining reciprocity and/or legitimacy (Oliver, 1990), or resolving conflicts that forestall action on critical problems (Susskind et al., 1999;Wondolleck andYaffee, 2003).However, conflicts often impair partnership formation and functioning (Gray, 1989;Gray,2004;Lewicki et al., 2003).Attempts at constructing partnerships may fail, for example, if there are few opportunities for parties to trade across issues they value differently, key stakeholders refuse to join, deadlines are unrealistic, stakeholders have strong BATNAs (Best Alternatives to Negotiated Agreements), if large power or other differences exist among the stakeholders (Gray, 1989;Hardy and Phillips, 1998; Susskind andThomas-Larmer, 1999), or if key identities of partners are threatened (Rothman, 1997; Gray, 2004; Fiol et al., 2009).All these factors will erode potential partners’ commitment to collaborate (Gray, 1989) and impede the likelihood that the partners will be successful in deciding on or implementing joint plans.