Performance Management in Collaborative Governance: A Review of the Literature and Synthesis of the Challenges

When public, private, and nonprofit organizations work together to solve complex social problems, questions emerge regarding how their collaborative performance can be managed. In this article, we review and synthesize findings from existing research on performance management in collaborative governance. We find that recent research has started exploring the rationales for, dynamics, and impact of collaborative performance management. We also identify salient collaborative performance management challenges and organize them into three categories: substantive problem-solving, collaborative process, and multi-relational accountability challenges. We describe several ways to address these challenges from the existing literature. As critical knowledge gaps remain, we identify key avenues for future research, including investigating the impact of collaborative performance management practices on collaborative outcomes, studying the dynamics of different performance management regimes through quasi-experimental action research and design methodologies, and analyzing the performance of collaborations at the team level from a behavioral perspective.