Evaluating Network Arrangements: Toward Revised Performance Measures

As public problems have become more and more complex, there has been a realization that individual government agencies, working alone, can no longer handle these "wicked issues." Instead, there has been a growing emphasis on replacing categorical or program-based funding arrangements with more integrated efforts. These efforts have been the focus of recent work on collaborative endeavors involving a variety of network arrangements. The difficulty has been that although these types of collaborative efforts are increasing in number, a related growing concern is whether such arrangements have been any more effective than those involving single-agency efforts. As a result, interest has increased in evaluating these types of efforts. However, the evaluation measures used are those that apply to individual organizations, rather than network arrangements that often include not only representatives of public sector organizations but also representatives of nonprofit and private organizations as well as individuals and groups representing community interests. New ways are needed of evaluating performance in these network arrangements.