Tina Nabatchi

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at Syracuse University

Participatory budgeting (PB) fosters community engagement in the allocation of public funds. Although its popularity has diminished in general-purpose governments, it is gaining traction in school districts. Yet research on PB’s managerial implications remains scarce. This study analyzes a PB process in a New York school district, examining key sta...

Environmental collaboration has become an increasingly common approach to the management of natural resources. Scholars and practitioners have tried to understand how collaborative structures impact performance using a multitude of single case studies and comparative studies. However, despite calls for the evaluation of collaborative performance, m...

This article takes a first step toward analyzing the characteristics of a cross-policy, state-wide collaborative system. Specifically, using data from the Atlas of Collaboration project, we offer a big-picture analysis of how over 200 externally directed collaborative governance regimes (CGRs) are operationalized in a state-level collaborative syst...

In this programmatic essay, we argue that public governance scholarship would benefit from developing a self-conscious and cohesive strand of “positive” scholarship, akin to social science subfields like positive psychology, positive organizational studies, and positive evaluation. We call for a program of research devoted to uncovering the factors...

As a group of fifteen scholars from different sub-fields, countries, and generations, we argue that public administration would benefit from launching a self-conscious and cohesive strand of ‘positive’ scholarship, akin to social science subfields like positive psychology, positive organisational studies, and positive evaluation. We call for a prog...

This study empirically investigates the relative efficacy of different direct participation processes. Specifically, we compare the effects of three types of participatory processes (public meetings, focus groups, and citizen juries) on participants' issue awareness, competence, empowerment, and trust in service professionals. We hypothesize that a...

Drawing on the results of a systematic literature review of empirical studies, this paper sheds light on six broad factors that facilitate the initiation and implementation of coproduction in public services. The factors are classified into two overarching categories: (1) organizational factors, including organizational arrangements, professional r...

Public administration-as a field of both academic study and professional practice-would benefit greatly from a more systematic and cohesive strand of research that is explicitly geared towards systematically studying the successes and positive contributions of government. At present, the citizenry at large is ill-informed about what government does...

Coproduction has received considerable attention from scholars and practitioners in recent years. While theory and some research suggest that coproduction can have individual-level effects on participating lay actors, few studies have tested such hypothesized effects. This study seeks to add to the evidence base for collective coproduction. Using d...

This essay honors Lisa Blomgren Amsler (formerly Bingham) as an International Association for Conflict Management Jeffrey Z. Rubin Award recipient (2006). Lisa is the author or co‐author of over 125 path‐breaking publications that span the fields of dispute resolution, negotiation, conflict management, public administration, public policy, law, phi...

Advocates claim that in comparison to traditional models of service delivery, co-production can have many benefits for citizens (eg, Levine and Fisher, 1984; Needham, 2008). This chapter explores those claims, and focuses specifically on the potential empowerment effects of co-production for citizens. The basic argument is that when citizens play p...

This article builds on theory and research to develop and explore four frames for understanding public values in administration and governance. The article first clarifies and distinguishes among several terms, including value, values, public value, and public values, and discusses the notions of creating public value, preventing public values fail...

Despite an international resurgence of interest in coproduction, confusion about the concept remains. This article attempts to make sense of the disparate literature and clarify the concept of coproduction in public administration. Based on some definitional distinctions and considerations about who is involved in coproduction, when in the service...

The National Academy of Medicine (NAM) in the recently issued report Improving Diagnosis in Health Care outlined eight major recommendations to improve the quality and safety of diagnosis. The #1 recommendation was to improve teamwork in the diagnostic process. This is a major departure from the classical approach, where the physician is solely res...

Despite an international resurgence of interest in coproduction, confusion about the concept remains. This article attempts to make sense of the disparate literature and clarify the concept of coproduction in public administration. Based on some definitional distinctions and considerations about who is involved in coproduction, when in the servic...

Although coproduction—the involvement of citizens and public sector professionals in the delivery of public services—is not a new issue in public administration, the concept is experiencing a resurgence of interest among scholars and practitioners. Since its formation in 2012, the International Institute of Administrative Sciences Study Group on th...

This article discusses three sets of insights generated in this special issue relating to the intended objectives and desired outcomes of coproduction, the inherent tensions in coproduction activities, and important factors for designing and implementing coproduction processes. It also identifies several problems with coproduction research, and ass...

In this virtual issue, we bring together a collection of research articles that—although not usually grouped together—all illustrate the importance of citizen-state interactions. Specifically, we include articles that directly incorporate citizens’ perceptions, attitudes, experiences of, or behavior related to public administration. About 10% of al...

The objective of large landscape conservation is to mitigate complex ecological problems through interventions at multiple and overlapping scales. Implementation requires coordination among a diverse network of individuals and organizations to integrate local-scale conservation activities with broad-scale goals. This requires an understanding of th...

Whether the goal is building a local park or developing disaster response models, collaborative governance is changing the way public agencies at the local, regional, and national levels are working with each other and with key partners in the nonprofit and private sectors. While the academic literature has spawned numerous case studies and context...

Experiments in collaborative governance over the last several decades have transformed the way the public's business is getting done. Despite growing interest, empirical research on the performance of cross-boundary collaboration continues to be limited by conceptual and methodological challenges. This article extends previous research to develop a...

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, conflict resolution practitioners faced a dilemma: they understood how to design better ADR processes but were often unsure of their authority to offer ADR and were entrenched in systems that made it difficult to use ADR. Today, public participation faces a similar dilemma. We know what good participation looks li...

The study of public values (PVs) is generating growing interest in public administration and public management, yet many challenges and unanswered questions remain. For the study of PVs to progress, we need to go beyond the traditional boundaries of public administration and management, to explore how and why scholars in different disciplines use t...

This study presents an empirical evaluation of the co-production of a “Statement to the Candidates” and a “Voters Guide” for a key U.S. Congressional race. Citizens produced these materials during an intensive process called “Reclaim November Ohio,” which used the Citizen Jury method of public deliberation. We use a series of pre- and post-test sur...

Public engagement is an umbrella term that encompasses numerous methods for bringing people together to address issues of public importance. In this article, we focus on direct public engagement in local government, exploring what we know and proposing areas where more research is needed. We first define direct public engagement and distinguish it...

This article explores deliberative civic engagement in the context of public administration and policy. The field of public administration and policy is seeing a resurgence of interest in deliberative civic engagement among scholars, practitioners, politicians, civic reformers, and others. Deliberative processes have been used to address a range of...

This article examines citizen participation in Lebanon. Specifically, we apply the International Association for Public Participation Spectrum of Public Participation (2007) and use survey, interview, and archival data to understand how and why Lebanese government agencies use citizen participation. In addition to reviewing survey data, we present...

This article examines the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission‟s Management Directive 110 (MD 110), which requires all federal agencies to offer Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) to employees with Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) complaints. Specifically, the article examines federal sector EEO complaint processing before and after the pass...

The field of deliberative civic engagement is rapidly growing around the world-but it remains highly fragmented. Motivated by the widely recognized need to pool the collective experience and knowledge of scholars, practitioners, and advocates, this book represents the first comprehensive assessment of deliberative civic engagement. Each chapter in...

This chapter provides an overview of deliberative civic engagement, an umbrella term for a wide variety of processes that enable citizens, civic leaders, and government officials to come together in public spaces where they can engage in constructive, informed, and decisive dialogue about important public issues. The chapter also defines related te...

This chapter draws the book to its conclusion. It reviews the key findings and questions from the preceding chapters, and identifies uncertainties and unresolved questions about deliberative civic engagement. The chapter then looks to the future, by developing an agenda for the advancement of the practice and study of deliberative civic engagement....

This article seeks to put the "public" back in public values research by theorizing about the potential of direct citizen participation to assist with identifying and understanding public values. Specifically, the article explores eight participatory design elements and offers nine propositions about how those elements are likely to affect the abil...

This study explores the experience of disputant–disputant interpersonal justice in workplace mediation in a public organization. The results show that there are significant differences between employees’ and supervisors’ experiences of disputant–disputant interpersonal justice. Moreover, the results indicate that the quality of participants’ intera...

Collaborative governance draws from diverse realms of practice and research in public administration. This article synthesizes and extends a suite of conceptual frameworks, research findings, and practice-based knowledge into an integrative framework for collaborative governance. The framework specifies a set of nested dimensions that encompass a l...

This essay identifies two problems that impede the ability of public administration to govern effectively in dark times. First, public administration has failed to adequately acknowledge itself as an arbiter of political conflict and as a discipline responsible for shaping societal affairs. Second, the field is entrenched in a bureaucratic pathology t...

Enthusiasm for deliberative democracy has grown in recent years, as many believe that it can create better citizens generally, and particularly increase their perceptions of political efficacy. Although the "efficacy effect" is frequently touted as a rationale for engaging in deliberative processes, there is little empirical research on the subject...

This article reviews and synthesizes diverse streams of literature to assess the potential of deliberative democracy for American public administration. It asserts that the field should refocus its attention on the role of citizens in the work of government to help address the pervasive citizenship and democratic deficits in the United States. Amer...

This paper examines the impacts of the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission’s Management Directive 110, which requires all federal agencies to offer Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) to federal sector Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) complainants. Specifically, the paper examines whether MD 110 improved federal sector EEO complaint processi...

This article explores the concept of dispute systems design for workplace disputes, focusing particularly on the first two stages: organizational diagnosis and design. It argues that dispute systems should be designed in light of the conflict-related motivations and behaviors of personnel under existing conditions, as well as the likely consequence...

Interest in transformative mediation is growing, yet there are few tools with which to assess mediators' use of the transformative model. This study presents a novel way of examining transformative mediation in practice. It triangulates data from training and screening processes and surveys of both mediators and participants to determine whether me...

This critique examines some of the negative impacts of economic liberalism on the field of public administration. It suggests that public administration must rediscover democratic ethos and offers public deliberation and deliberative democracy as potential tools with which to do so.

This study compares litigation and alternative dispute resolution (ADR) in civil cases handled by Assistant United States Attorneys (AUSAs) during the period 1995 to 1998. The findings indicate that that use of ADR can be an efficient and effective procedural solution to the problems of time and cost in the justice system without sacrificing the qu...

Purpose This study examines the structure and dimensionality of organizational justice in a workplace mediation setting. It has three purposes: to determine whether the procedural and interpersonal justice factors in the four‐factor model of organizational justice can be split, thereby providing support for a six‐factor model; to identify how the s...

This article uses resource dependence and institutional theory to examine the implementation of the Administrative Dispute Resolution Acts of 1990 and 1996. The insights from these theories are employed to explain the diffusion of and variation in the application of alternative dispute resolution (ADR) to different programmatic areas. Although agen...

This study explores the tactics and strategies of transformative mediators in practice. Specifically, the study examines the premises, principles, and behaviors of mediators in REDRESS, the United States Postal Service (USPS) employment mediation program. The study is also a process evaluation used to determine whether the REDRESS program is being...

Leaders in public affairs identify tools and instruments for the new governance through networks of public, private, and nonprofit organizations. We argue the new governance also involves people—the tool makers and tool users—and the processes through which they participate in the work of government. Practitioners are using new quasi-legislative an...

This study examines the relationship between organizational justice and workplace mediation. Despite the value of using organizational justice to assess the perceived fairness of workplace mediation, there may be some problems with the wholesale application of the traditional four-factor model of organizational justice to such processes. The most o...

After reviewing the logic and basics of Environmental Conflict Resolution (ECR), this article analyzes the praise for and criticisms of ECR. This article acknowledges the initial successes in the 1970s and 1980s that led to a major period of expansion for ECR, and continues today, but argues that it must do a better job of proving itself. That is,...

This paper examines how a disputant's role in a conflict impacts the disputant's perceptions of and satisfaction with transformative mediation. Specifically, it examines evidence of disputants' interactions in the context of transformative mediation for employees and supervisors at the United States Postal Service (USPS). The paper finds that manag...

This paper asserts that game theory can be a valuable tool in dispute system design efforts. The premise is simple: If different dispute system designs have different impacts on the decisions and behaviors of participants, then game theory can be used to help logically think through the relationships among program design, participation, and outcome...

Historically, researchers in conflict management have used theories of distributive and procedural justice to explain participant satisfaction with dispute resolution processes. Using a large national sample of exit surveys collected from participants in the United States Postal Service (USPS) REDRESS(R) program, the authors show that the procedura...

The transformative model of mediation, although well established in the mediation of family and community disputes, is a relatively new approach to dispute resolution in employment settings. In contrast to traditional mediation approaches that focus on problem-solving, transformative mediation seeks to provide opportunities for empowerment and reco...