Public actors have changed their role, becoming coordinators of complex networks and brokers of diverse skills. Evidence on successful partnerships is rich, best practice catalogues abound, but conceptual tools making sense of such richness are lacking. Our proposal is to use social mechanisms as key analytical devices for investigating collaborative practice.
Recently, policy analysts advocated the use of mechanisms in understanding policy phenomena (Mayntz, 2004; Barzelay, 2007). According to Renate Mayntz (2004), mechanisms reconstruct causal chains, stating “how, by what intermediate steps, a certain outcome follows from a set of initial conditions”.
Several such mechanisms (blame avoidance, bandwagon effects, performance feedbacks, etc.) have been put forward in the literature. The present paper provides an original contribution by proposing a set of mechanisms specifically thought for dealing with complex partnerships. The paper draws on different research projects across several policy sectors (local development, crisis management, capacity building) where the authors identified mechanisms that brought to success in managing complex networks (secondary sources will be added to the analysis).
The main insight is to start understanding partnerships from the perspective of policy innovators. Here, three issues appear relevant: a) How to generate/maintain engagement? (incentive mechanisms); b) How to generate/maintain/decrease the role of an actor? (reputational mechanisms); c) How to facilitate smooth interactions? (coordination mechanisms).
There are two main advancements that this paper makes. First, mechanisms can be a good way for refreshing implementation theory, deepening our knowledge on the conditions for successful implementation networks. Secondly, the theory can provide a useful tool for policy practitioners. Mechanisms have in fact a level of abstraction that permits their extrapolation from a source-case and replication into a target-case (Bardach, 2004). Uncovering mechanisms can then be a good way for understanding dense narratives and enrich practitioners toolkit with conceptual and practical levers for governing networks.
