Street-level partnership: making collaborative service delivery work against the odds

Abstract Collaborative governance is widely promoted as a way to address complex social challenges, yet collaborative service delivery often operates in environments where enabling conditions are weak, fragmented, or inconsistently institutionalized. How collaboration persists under such constraints remains insufficiently understood. This study examines how frontline actors sustain cross-sector service delivery when formal coordination mechanisms, stable mandates, and institutional supports are limited. Drawing on a qualitative study of five social services for families at risk in Croatia, the analysis is based on interviews, focus groups, and practitioner workshops involving more than 100 professionals across public and third-sector organizations. The study proceeds in two steps. First, it identifies and conceptualizes the mechanism through which collaboration remains workable in an unfavorable setting. This mechanism is termed street-level partnership, defined as a patterned configuration of adaptive practices through which frontline professionals recalibrate routines, maintain cooperative ties, coordinate direct work with clients, and generate embedded learning and informal accountability. Second, a comparative analysis across service-delivery modes assesses the variation and stability of this mechanism. While street-level partnership appears across all five services, its configuration and durability vary with contractual form, operational longevity, and degree of institutionalization. By shifting attention from ideal design conditions to everyday practice, the article offers a grounded account of how collaborative governance is stabilized in constrained environments. Collaboration persists not because enabling conditions are optimal, but because frontline actors actively assemble workable partnerships, although their durability remains shaped by structural context.