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Over the 30 years, public management and administration scholars have crossed disciplinary boundaries to build a body of scholarship on collaboration for public good, services, and values. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Public management and administration researchers need to integrate the scholarship on collaboration through systems thinking. How do we define collaboration? How do we distinguish among the categories of collaborative public management (CPM), collaborative governance (CG), and networks? How do systems and institutional context shape collaboration in these categories? Within these categories, what are our units of analysis: individual leadership, organizations, or groups in collaboration processes? How do we apply what we know to practice and design?

The work requires that the authors examine CPM, CG, and networks in their larger and nested institutional contexts to determine how they are related to and shape each other. The Institutional Analysis and Development framework may inform this work. CPM or networks may be nested in CG processes and structures in inter-governmental contexts.

Researchers need more clarity as to the context within which CPM, CG, and networks occur, and in units of analysis and the roles of individual people as managers and as agents of organizations, as distinguished from organizations as constructs.

Scholars need to apply research to practice related to designing systems and structures in which collaboration occurs.

As humankind faces increasingly complex and multifaceted policy problems that cross inter-governmental and international boundaries and require inter-sectoral work, managers and organizations must improve both the design of collaboration in governance and management and mastery of essential skills to participate in collaboration.

CPM, CG, and network research does not sufficiently incorporate or control for institutional context into research design.

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, proponents must conduct more rigorous assessments of its utility under different conditions and invest in data collection that goes far beyond present efforts. The article concludes by reviewing the challenges and opportunities facing ECR in the twenty-first century. Singled out for attention is the need for scholars and practitioners to understand ECR interventions as targeted at aggregate rather than dyadic relationships, as complex systems embedded in even larger complex systems, as time-extended phenomena, and as ripe for evaluation for their impact on substantive environmental outcomes.

The research articles in this volume were initially presented at a conference, entitled “Cutting Edge Theories and Recent Developments in Conflict Resolution,” which celebrated the 20th anniversary of the Program on the Analysis and Resolution of Conflicts (PARC) at Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. Presenters were encouraged to submit their papers for consideration, and following a rigorous peer review and revision process, nine articles were accepted. The volume explores some of the major themes of conflict analysis, including how powerful dominant discourses can both soothe and exacerbate conflict, the roles of civic organizations in promoting peace and incubating democratic principles, the ways in which different forms of dialogue are used to heal historically dysfunctional intergroup relations, and the importance of a deeply institutional, structural understanding of ethnocentrism and racism. The authors conducted their research in several different countries – the US, Canada, Bosnia, and Northern Ireland – and used a wide range of analytical techniques including in-depth interviews, surveys, and document analysis. What holds them together is the rigorous tie they make between theory and empirical data. Some authors have built conflict theory inductively, based on their own research and/or secondary sources, while others have tested existing models with empirical data. These articles collectively make a solid contribution to theoretical development in the conflict analysis field.

Thomas E. Boudreau graduated Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude from Boston College. He completed his PhD in the Social Science Program in 1985 at the Maxwell School of Citizen and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. While at the Maxwell School, Boudreau was the research assistant for Donald T. Campbell, the Schweitzer Chair of the Humanities at Syracuse University. He also worked as Project Director of the Crisis Management and United Nations Research Projects at the Carnegie Council in New York City. He taught at the School of International Service at American University and the University of Pennsylvania before coming back to the Maxwell School where he currently teaches in the Political Science Department. He is also a research fellow at the Institute for Resource and Security Studies in Cambridge, MA, where he has specialized in issues of global governance, global climate change, and nonproliferation. Boudreau has written two books: Sheathing the Sword: The U.N. Secretary-General and the Prevention of International Conflict and Universitas: The Social Restructuring of Undergraduate Education in the United States. He is currently working on a third book, The Law of Nations: Legal Order in a Violent World. He has a special interest in interdisciplinary inquiry, especially competing epistemologies and how they contribute to interpersonal, intergroup, and international conflict.

The Program on the Analysis and Resolution of Conflicts (PARC) at Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs is widely and rightly regarded as a leading center in the theory and practice of conflict analysis and its resolution. In a fitting tribute to its 20th anniversary, many researchers, academics, and practitioners who once studied there returned in 2007 to present their current research and work in the field. This wonderfully edited collection of peer-reviewed papers is the welcome result, and is yet another example of the cutting-edge work that has long been associated with PARC.

Democratization has become the prescription for peace in conflictual societies, but often stagnates in a political standoff or devolves back to war. Sustainable and effective democracy in these societies requires a citizenry which actively guides and pressures political leaders toward effective policy making for peace. But in societies with little or no democratic tradition, it takes time to develop the attitudes and organizations required. This study examines the relationship of democratic exposure to the development of the ideology of external political participation among peacebuilding NGOs. Using original field interview data, it compares the ideology of 28 peacebuilding NGOs in Northern Ireland to 37 in the less democratic context of Bosnia. The study examines the effects of exposure to democracy on “externally democratic ideology,” defined as an ideology of participation in the political processes of society external to the organization. Three aspects of exposure to democracy are examined: societal democratization, internal democracy in the NGO, and mentorship by outsiders from established democracies. The findings are that internal democracy is associated with externally democratic ideology, but outsider mentorship is not, even when controlling for dominating relationships, and neither is societal democracy, except indirectly via its effect on internal democracy. Implications for theory, policy, and future research are discussed.