Governing Cross-Sector Collaboration

FOREWORD

Society is indeed a complex system of interdependencies that we describe as different sectors—public, private, and nonprofit. As we live our lives, we are generally oblivious to the different sectors. We may, for example, have a notion that the government is somehow involved with trash collection, even though a private company collects it from our homes and takes the trash to wherever it goes. Yet we are mostly oblivious about how this simple service, which we take for granted, is managed and influenced by the different sectors: local, state, and federal governments; private haulers; public and private disposal providers; nonprofit environmental organizations; and others.

Nothing is simple. No aspect of modern society is the domain ...