State Agencies in Action: Regulating, Providing, and Coordinating Through Intergovernmental Agreements

This field note examines the interorganizational collaboration of state agencies by analyzing the goals and activities outlined in their formal agreements. Leveraging extensive web-based archival data from Iowa, the study reviewed 8,050 agreements involving at least one state agency from 1993 to 2020 across 33 service areas. Insights from exploratory data analysis, focusing on actor, relational, and temporal dimensions, provide a detailed view of specific instances of these agreements. The study finds that state agencies use formal agreements to work with other governments and nongovernmental organizations to fulfill regulation, provision, and coordination roles in service delivery.