Collaboration, strategic plans, and government performance: the case of efforts to reduce homelessness

Practice has outpaced our empirical knowledge of the role and impact of collaboration on the design and effect of strategic plans. It is this lack of awareness and understanding of the phenomenon that motivates the research presented in this paper. We explore empirically the linkage between collaboratively developed strategic plans and governmental effort to ameliorate a public problem through a mixed-method approach using panel data analysis. The findings demonstrate that the existence of a collaborative strategic plan and the presence of various components of a plan’s design increase the number of beds made available for homeless individuals in the US. Homelessness is one of the most intractable social and economic problems in the US, but our analysis demonstrates that a collaborative plan design can be one mechanism to help address the problem.