Local food system governance increasingly occurs in collaborative venues at the local, state, and regional levels. Prominent examples of such are food policy councils (FPCs). FPCs take a systemic approach to improve local food systems by including diverse stakeholders to advise on policy development. Th e authors study public FPCs to understand how policies structure the stakeholder composition and goals of FPCs and how FPCs' stakeholder composition facilitates and/or impedes performance. Data come from a content analysis of policies that mandate the structure and functions of public FPCs and interviews with FPC representatives. Findings indicate that FPCs connected to a broader array of food policy actors in their communities produce more diverse policy outputs, but this outcome is tempered by whether council members represent personal or organizational interests. Practitioner Points• Collaborative governance can be an eff ective strategy when public problems are reframed to account for new information or failures of traditional governance approaches. • Collaborative policy-making eff orts in food system governance should include participants who serve as liaisons to a broader array of community stakeholders. • Diverse governance structures are more productive when members have latitude to leverage individual expertise in policy making rather than simply serving the interests of organizations they represent. • Local communities interested in addressing a wide range of food-related policy issues should consider creating food policy councils or similar collaborative policy-making eff orts.part of the policy process (Ansell and Gash 2008).

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Representation is a hallmark of democratic governance. Widely studied within traditional modes of governance, representation is less studied in alternative governance settings, such as collaborative governance arrangements. Collaborative governance arrangements are specifically designed to encourage inclusion and participation among a diverse array of stakeholders in some part of the policy process. Our research contrasts different forms of representation observed in a collaborative governance arrangement and identifies factors contributing to observed patterns in representation therein. We analyze descriptive representation (i.e., "representation in form") or substantive representation (i.e., "representation in practice") and look for inconsistencies between them. Our case study is a regional food policy council located in the Western United States. Among our findings is that discrepancies between descriptive and substantive representation can be explained by shared goals, local norms, organizational structure, and heterogeneity in member capacity. We conclude our article with a discussion of the theoretical and practical implications of this research.

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With the United States grappling with the greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression, questions are emerging about whether outsourcing contributes to the instability of government service production. In this article, the authors explore systemic risk in privatized service implementation networks. Reliance on networks of private agents for service production contributes to the disarticulated and fragmented state and increases the potential for systemic crisis if shocks to the network occur, putting vulnerable clients at risk. Government must focus on understanding systemic risk in networked governance arrangements and building resilient networks to avoid crises, the authors argue. Finally, potential research on systemic risk in networked governance arrangements is discussed. In public administration as governance, it is essential that we do not diminish our institutions to such an extent that we lose our capacity to support the development of sound public policy, as well as our ability to effectively implement that policy.

Nonprofits increasingly participate in government‐funded service implementation networks (SINs). However, extant research does not explore how organizations might strategically tailor communication to different stakeholder groups or use different communication tools for management. Stakeholders are not a monolithic group, and communicating with stakeholders within SINs is hypothesized to involve different forms of communication than communicating with stakeholders outside of the network. In this paper, relationship management theory is used to examine strategic communication with stakeholder groups within and outside of SINs. Both traditional and emergent (e.g., social media) forms of communication are examined. Survey and interview data on communication within and outside communication networks are analyzed using organizational network analysis techniques. The findings indicate strategic communication in the network differs from strategic communication with stakeholders outside the network. Within the network, organizations place varying emphasis on the use of traditional and emergent forms of communication for management, implying nonprofit managers funded under government grants continue to rely on face‐to‐face and phone communication and have yet to adopt emerging communication strategies to assist in the management of their programs with their partner organizations.Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A key question of each Minnowbrook has been how public administration scholarship can be relevant to practice (Carboni and Nabatchi 2019; Nabatchi and Carboni 2019; O’Leary, Van Slyke, and Kim 2010). This question remains salient today, as public administration scholarship is increasingly distant from the challenges identified by practitioners. Academic research agendas are often disconnected from the social issues and challenges of public governance. Field norms incentivize and exacerbate this cleavage. As a result, past calls for more practice-oriented scholarship lack widespread implementation. In this essay, we propose modest shifts in how academic research is conducted to link it with problems, issues, and opportunities identified by the public service practitioners and professional communities. We refer to this shift as Integrative Public Administration. We also identify and make suggestions about how to change some field level conditions that hamper the shift to Integrative Public Administration.

Purpose-oriented networks—often referred to as goal-directed networks—are a widely recognized empirical phenomenon in the public administration and management literatures. However, there is no systematic understanding about which characteristics are constitutive for these entities to be present. We use Goetz’s multilevel concept to develop a conceptual framework for purpose-oriented networks that includes four constitutive dimensions: purpose, joint effort, membership, and governance. Then we classify existing literature into this framework. Constitutive dimensions allow scholars to operationalize concepts and develop hypotheses that are testable across a wider range of purpose-oriented networks, better define the external validity of results, and improve the accumulation of knowledge across disciplinary perspectives as well as to point to areas in need of more study. We conclude that the fundamental concepts that constitute purpose-oriented networks are dangerously understudied and are in dire need of systematic, sustained empirical attention.