By Alketa Peci
The theme of partnerships and collaboration between the public sector and nonprofit organizations pervades RAP’s third issue, in this year of its 50th Anniversary celebration.
In continuing with the editorial partnerships, our guest editor for this issue is Professor Paulo Roberto Motta, who was one of the first editors of RAP and is one of the most admired scholars in the field of public administration in Brazil.
The editorial partnership is an initiative that honors and symbolizes the collective effort needed to produce an academic journal. The longevity of RAP is due to the community of editors, reviewers and authors that systematically interpret, criticize and rebuild public administration and its role in the national and international context.
By Paulo Roberto Motta
The challenges to innovate in public management manifest constantly, especially in this time of greater disbelief in the possibilities of the governments to meet public demands. In this context, it emerges an urgent need of short-term and creative responses.
The citizens’ frustrations bring to the academic milieu the responsibility to rethink the administration. In this sense, RAP selects relevant contributions from scholars of the field, who are focused on producing and analyzing new ideas to improve alternative actions in the public sector.
The last decades have been fruitful for innovation in public management, mainly because of the advance of collaborative strategies.
Through a variety of analyses, the articles in this issue build on a common concern regarding collaborative dimensions, with examples of modern relationships of the public administration with nonprofit organizations and the private sector.
The idea of collaboration — increasingly pronounced and practiced in the public sector — has proven to be promising in a world where management practices, when gathered, can deliver much more than when they are isolated.
For example, regarding public and private sectors, improving collaboration can minimize the idea that private sector gains and public sector bureaucratic practices damage quality, access and equity of service delivery. Private management, focused on responding to demands, can gain from the social perspective of public management, which is based on the provision of services and in the mediator and protector role of equity.
On the other hand, the public sector can improve, by adopting an entrepreneurial approach with positive effects on the governmental bureaucracy. Based on normative budgets, non-delegable routines and duplicate controls, the public sector can benefit from private practices based on indicative budgets, delegable tasks and direct control.
The experience in this collaboration contributes to developing new perspectives, new understanding and, possibly, a new identity with regard to the public affairs.
Collaboration with nonprofit organizations presents some important differences, because these organizations combine characteristics from the public and private sectors, with the advantage of operating at lower costs and enabling better leadership practices. Therefore, nonprofits refine, in practice, the new concepts of public and private, which are already beyond the traditional concepts of property: “public” is related to the scope and impact of the action and “private” to the significant social responsibilities. In practical terms, the overlapping of the concepts produces unusual and creative forms of cooperation, including with other entities, then providing a better response to democracy and public service challenges.
The contemporary productive arrangements involve a great plurality of actors, of private and public entities, in the search for better services and products. The international productive networks call for the competitiveness of the public administration in order to guarantee the development of the country. Cooperation deserves incentives, as well as more studies, as it increasingly emerges as an important basis for progress.
There is an important contribution of the different forms of cooperation that must be continuously assessed.
We wish you a pleasant reading!
Publication Dates
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Publication in this collection
May-Jun 2017
