Understanding the Emergence and Persistence of Mandated Collaboration: A Policy Feedback Perspective of the United States’s Model to Address Homelessness

Abstract

Collaboration is commonplace in contemporary public administration. In many instances, policy mandates collaboration between previously unconnected organizations for those organizations to obtain essential funding for public services, thus creating new administrative structures grounded in collaboration. There exists substantial research that focuses on the collaborative process and potential outcomes of these structures, yet their emergence and development is less understood. The Housing and Urban Development (HUD) continuum of care (CoC) model is one such collaborative structure that has been the dominant administrative service delivery system used to address homelessness in the United States since the early 1990s. A historical analysis reveals that policy feedback effects help explain the emergence and persistence of the CoC model from before its origin to its eventual codification in the Homeless Emergency Assistance and Rapid Transition to Housing (HEARTH) Act of 2009. A policy feedback perspective of the CoC model demonstrates how the interplay of policy, politics, and administration led to a mandate to collaborate to address a large-scale social problem.