Anthem EnviroExperts

Reviewed by Nicholas Marantz, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Collaborative Governance: Private Roles for Public Goals in Turbulent Times, by John D. Donahue and Richard J. Zeckhauser, Princeton University Press, 305pp

In recent decades, U.S. government has relied increasingly on private corporations (including non-profits) to provide an array of services. John Donahue and Richard Zeckhauser call this phenomenon “collaborative governance,” and their book describes strategies to increase the public benefits from such arrangements. Donahue and Zeckhauser present over a dozen cases of collaborative governance in action, in domains ranging from education to national security. They explain how administrators can determine when to delegate tasks to private organizations, how to assess potential collaborators, and how to evaluate ongoing projects. But, while Donahue and Zeckhauser provide much clear technical guidance for government officials and concerned citizens, their evidence suggests that collaborative governance may be inherently upwardly distributive, an issue which they do not clearly address.

Donahue and Zeckhauser contend that, among other advantages, collaborative governance can increase public benefits by inducing private actors to commit additional resources. To illustrate this potential, the authors invoke examples from three New York City parks. While these collaborations all resulted in the commitment of additional funds and talent, they also entailed the upward distribution of public resources. In the case of Central Park, Donahue and Zeckhauser note that collaboration has produced “an upscale tilt to the park’s image, amenities, and regulations.” Bryant Park “represents a relatively large investment of public funds to create an asset with quite focused private benefits.” Private investment in Harlem’s Swindler Cove Park yielded a $3 million dollar boathouse, used mostly by rowers who live far from the surrounding disadvantaged community.

The authors acknowledge these distributive consequences without addressing whether they are intrinsic to “collaboration for resources,” as they term the relevant arrangements. Given the consistency of their evidence, the question merits attention. Collaborative Governance would have been more successful if Donahue and Zeckhauser had addressed this possibility with the same zeal and insight that they bring to other aspects of their topic.

Reviewed by Saleem Ali, University of Queensland

Michael L. Ross looks at how developing nations are shaped by their mineral wealth.

The Oil Curse: How Petroleum Wealth Shapes the Development of Nations, by Michael Ross, Princeton University Press, 296pp

The distortions in economic development that  natural resource wealth can cause have been well-studied for many years by social scientists. UCLA political scientist Michael Ross’s new book, The Oil Curse is premised on his view that hydrocarbon wealth has four key attributes that lead to its potential for being “cursed”: scale, source, stability, and secrecy. Hydrocarbon projects have massive capital investment (scale), are not funded by citizen taxation or innovation incentives and are hence less connected to democratic parameters (source),  are beholden to volatile commodity markets (stability) and have easily concealed revenues from oil, due to the contract norms between companies and governments (secrecy).

Ross further contends that the curse started to gain traction when state-run oil companies became more common. Such companies have much less accountability than privately held firms, and Ross considers their structure a major cause for perpetuating the “oil curse.” Therefore, although corporate executives may find Ross’s negative revelations about the essential lubricant of modern capitalism to be troubling, they can gain some solace that he strongly blames this outcome on government control of industry.

However, Ross remains nuanced about assigning culpability by also noting that private-sector management still needs some government oversight to be constructive. Ross’s key prescription to grapple with the oil curse is developing mutual accountability between the private and public sectors. Though he tends to make some broad causal statements and relies far too much on regression for his insights, Ross’s work is an important contribution to the literature on the consequential role of oil in development planning.