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Development of trust among organization leaders and staff is important to the formation of successful organizational collaborations. Nonprofit leaders in two rural regions of southern Illinois and the Mississippi Delta demonstrate an awareness of the importance of trust among participants in the collaborations they engage in. Several environmental factors both encourage and constrain the ability of nonprofits in the two regions to form collaborations and build trust among partners. One of these, rural location, is largely considered a positive influence, making it easier for nonprofit leaders to get to know each other and work cooperatively. In addition, other factors such as race relations, government policies and mandates, nonprofit leadership, and organization financial and political resources have powerful effects on creation of collaborations and development of trust.Collaboration is a social exchange involving commitment of knowledge, skills, and emotions by the leaders and staff of participating organizations. It is an "intense form of mutual attachment, operating at the levels of interest, intent, affect and behaviour; actors are bound together by mutually supportive pursuit of individual and collective benefit" (Cropper, 1996, p. 82). Individuals involved in the collaboration must be willing to risk personal and organizational reputations, relinquish a measure of stability and control over their work lives, and enter into unequal exchanges as a partner that is expected to contribute more resources than weaker partners, or a partner willing to risk working with more powerful entities.What binds the individuals and organizations together over time in this social exchange? One important factor is the building of trust relationships among people and organizations in the collaboration. Bonds of trust and consequent reciprocal behaviors help the collaboration survive rough times that Note: The authors wish to thank the Nonprofit Sector Research Fund of the Aspen Institute, which funded this project, thus making it possible. We also express our deep appreciation to the editor of NVSQ and the reviewers of our manuscript for their insightful, instructive comments.

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Competitive sourcing, meaning public-private competitions to perform work in the federal civil service, was made a priority management policy of the George W. Bush administration. Competition, it is believed, will greatly enhance administrative efficiency whichever bidder, public or private, wins. Introduction of such market-based human resource policies into the federal civil service has engendered debate over long-term effects on merit principles, public service motives and ethics, and administrative performance. This article contributes to that discussion by examining the policy origins and purposes behind competitive sourcing and by analyzing implementation of the policy during the Bush administration. Results show that the market ideology expressed in competitive sourcing has been moderated and mediated by the implementation process. Congressional and public employee involvement alongside that of the administration produced policy outcomes of mixed results.

The US government has been actively engaged for the last 15 years in foreign assistance programs for building democratic governance institutions and enhancing overall government capacity in the former Soviet bloc countries. Transfers of public policies, administrative structures and management practices from one country to another are problematic. In this article we suggest that there are some fundamental constraints inherent in the framework of cross-national transfers. It identifies two major transferability challenges: (1) feasibility of transfer and (2) appropriateness of transfer. This article discusses three institution building programs of short duration (three to five years), whose broad purposes were institutional and professional capacity building. Many powerful forces, domestic and international, shape the likelihood of democratic consolidation in the transitional democracies. While fundamental questions about the transferability of institutional norms and structures from one country to another remain, our experiences indicate that thoughtful and flexible implementation strategies are likely to increase the chances that soft technology transfer projects will contribute to building institutional capacity. A great degree of uncertainty, nevertheless, will always remain in determining the long-term impacts of foreign technical assistance programs for transfer of institutional norms and structures. Points for practitionersInternational projects for institution building encounter two critical challenges:(1) constraints on transfer of political, social and economic institutions from one society to another; and (2) designing and managing a project that establishes