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AbstractStudies of network effectiveness in the collaborative public program setting commonly have found that actors with more organizational partners, more indirect (bridging) ties to other partners, and more cohesive relationships among partners have greater success in implementing projects. This article contributes to this literature by developing and testing hypotheses about how strength of relationships, measured by frequency of contacts, moderates these results. In the context of community water supply projects in Nepal, the article shows that greater frequency of contacts between communities and organizational partners enhances the impact of having more partners and more cohesive relationships among partners but decreases the impact of having more indirect connections. For practitioners and network theorists, these findings highlight the importance of strength of relationships in the link between networks and performance.

The added value of self-organized policy networks is widely recognized, but how they impact outcomes is less well understood. This article extends the existing literature on networks and collaborative performance by analyzing the effect of network capital on policy outcomes in a developing country, Nepal. A study of the collaborative Rural Water Supply and Sanitation Program (RWSSP) in Nepal shows that village communities' success in getting RWSSP funds for their projects depends on their ties to a greater number of organizational partners for resources and know-how, and particularly to bridging partners that can also draw on experiences from a wider range of other communities. Communities are also successful when they secure credible support from a more cohesive subgroup of organizational partners that have considerable overlap in the projects they do share. Thus, direct ties to a broader set of organizational partners and indirect reach to other communities lead to better performance but so does the greater cohesion among the partners who tend to share the same set of community projects. Since partner selection inevitably imposes a trade-off between indirect reach and cohesion, a balanced strategy that accounts for both features appears important for developing network capital. Adapted from the source document.

Most research examining the relationship between social capital and outcomes focuses on either internal social capital or external social capital. This article examines the impact of both internal and external social capital on the success of self‐organizing community initiatives. A study of community water projects in a developing country, Nepal, shows that communities that enjoy less internal conflict and more external partnerships are more likely to be successful in securing agency funds for their projects. Also, communities face trade‐offs between internal and external social capital. These dimensions of social capital are not perfect substitutes, and communities that maintain a strategic balance between the two maximize gains from a trade‐off. Moreover, such an optimal choice is dependent on the level of internal and external social capital that these communities hold.

AbstractDebates about risk in interlocal service contracts treat contracts as discrete dyadic exchanges. We challenge this notion by advancing a multiplex network contacting approach, which asserts that interlocal contracting represents a multiplex network phenomenon, defined as overlapping multiple service contract networks. Simultaneous treatment of multiple networks is required to understand how local governments mitigate contract risks. We claim that local governments create multiplex network structures comprising more than one service contract networks in order to reduce service contracting risks. Multivariate exponential random graph models were fit to joint high‐risk and low or mixed‐risk contract networks involving eight local government services in Pinellas County, Florida. The results demonstrate that local governments mitigate risk by creating multiplex reciprocity and multiplex network closure in contracts that involve multiple services.

The authors develop and test an integrated framework for understanding how transaction cost and exchange embeddedness contribute to the general problems of institutional collection action, contracting, and cooperation. An application of the framework to Georgia cities' interlocal cooperative behavior across multiple services suggests that interlocal cooperation provides a viable alternative to both private contracting and hierarchical arrangements and that transaction characteristics-asset specificity and measurement difficulties-and reciprocal exchange relationship predict the participation and the amount of interlocal cooperation. A curvilinear relationship was discovered between transaction characteristics and interlocal cooperation that extends Williamson's linear prediction. Adapted from the source document.

The authors develop and test an integrated framework for understanding how transaction cost and exchange embeddedness contribute to the general problems of institutional collection action, contracting, and cooperation. An application of the framework to Georgia cities' interlocal cooperative behavior across multiple services suggests that interlocal cooperation provides a viable alternative to both private contracting and hierarchical arrangements and that transaction characteristics—asset specificity and measurement difficulties—and reciprocal exchange relationship predict the participation and the amount of interlocal cooperation. A curvilinear relationship was discovered between transaction characteristics and interlocal cooperation that extends Williamson's linear prediction.

How are fragmented metropolitan areas characterized by multiple actors and multiple relationships governed? This has been a question of enduring interest in the study of local politics and policy. Recent works have made progress in understanding the emergence of self-organizing networks for individual service relationships. However, in the context of multiple service relationships, patterns of service networks that evolve as a consequence of local governments' actions to address transaction problems have been long overlooked. This article begins to fill this gap in the literature by analyzing pay-for-service contracts across multiple municipal services in one metropolitan county in Florida. The results obtained from matrix correlation and matrix regression based on a quadratic assignment procedure reveal that local jurisdictions develop cross-service reciprocity networks in a multiple services contract environment to resolve credibility of commitment problems they encounter in entering and maintaining interlocal service contracts.