Special Delivery: Special District Use of Collaboration to Solve Challenges

As the special district sector continues to increase in number across the U.S., understanding their role in public governance increases in value both to practitioners and academia alike. The state of the academic literature on special districts does not yet reflect the large size and importance of the sector and has been severely limited by available data, mainly coming from the U.S. Census Bureau. Existing research has focused on broad descriptions of the field of special districts, some studies focus on policy and political effects; but scant research analyzes behavior within and among special districts, particularly with their public entity partners. This research aims to answer the question: When do special districts seek collaborative solutions to solve challenges? This research uses Qualitative Comparative Analysis to inductively and deductively explore the "causes" of special district collaboration across six descriptive case studies. For each case, a set of conditions was identified that resulted in a stable, public-to-public collaboration. Each set of conditions was then compared and distilled down into three sets of minimized conditions producing the outcome. The QCA sufficient condition equations were influenced by the district’s size or scope--the larger districts had unique issues and condition equations affecting collaborative behaviors. The scope of each of the six districts, in terms of its budget, staffing, customers, and acreage, naturally divided into three categories, setting the stage for a proposed scope-based typology of districts. This research also contributes to the body of knowledge about special districts by contributing six qualitative case studies which supplements the sometimes problematic data available from the U.S. Census Bureau.