Collaborative organizations, which often bring together government agencies, nonprofit groups, and other stakeholders to address regional issues like watershed preservation, frequently struggle to achieve their goals. A recent study from North Carolina State University suggests that a particular administrative strategy may improve these groups’ ability to deliver on their missions.
“These organizations tend to do a good job of planning, but then stumble when it comes to transitioning from the planning process to actually executing the projects and processes necessary to implement the plan,” said Graham Ambrose, corresponding author of the study and an assistant professor of public administration at North Carolina State University. “We wanted to learn more about why this happens, and whether there were administrative approaches that could improve implementation for future collaborations.”
Ambrose explained that their research points toward what they call a “mixed services transition approach.” He described this as a method where groups avoid moving directly from planning into full-scale implementation. Instead, they begin small-scale implementation activities—such as pilot projects or seeking additional funding—while still finalizing formal plans and considering changes in organizational structure as priorities shift toward implementation.
The study analyzed nearly 30 years of data on 31 collaborative organizations focused on watershed issues in four regions: Delaware Inland Bays, Narragansett Bay, Tampa Bay, and Tillamook Bay. All groups received funding from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s National Estuary Program, which supports organizations working on pollution mitigation and estuary preservation.
“Many of these groups were unable to successfully transition from planning to implementation, stagnated and were dissolved,” Ambrose said. “Other groups made some headway, and some have proved to be sustainable and resilient. We wanted to see what allowed the resilient organizations to succeed where the others struggled.”
The researchers identified two main findings. First, collaborations using the mixed services approach were more likely both to implement their plans effectively and remain resilient over time.
“For example, EPA funding is limited and can only be used for a defined range of projects,” Ambrose noted. “In practical terms, this means that some of the goals groups identified in the planning stage would not be eligible for funding. It makes sense that organizations that took steps to secure additional funding were better able to implement their plans, and better able to maintain the interest and goodwill of their stakeholders. By the same token, implementing pilot projects can help identify previously unanticipated challenges or opportunities, which can benefit larger scale implementation efforts later on.”
Second, Ambrose highlighted gaps in existing research: “Planning and implementation are different activities, have different end goals, and require different organizational structures and responsibilities,” he said. “And while a lot of excellent research has been done on what makes planning processes work, and a lot of excellent research has been done on what makes implementation processes work, there has been very little research looking at both of these things within the same organization. And there has been virtually no work on what exactly the transition between planning and implementation looks like.
“As a result, people are drawing on research from the planning process to give advice on best practices for implementation, and vice versa. And the results have been decidedly mixed.
“We think our contribution here is both practical and academic,” Ambrose continued. “At a high level we propose a new way to think about collaboration and governance literatures. But the primary goal of our work here is to offer more consistent and practical advice to practitioners. The advice thus far has been fairly inconsistent – we believe our approach can help address some of those inconsistencies.
“Now that we’ve presented the ‘mixed services transition approach,’ the next step is to further test it. While the proposed approach helps structure our thinking we believe there are many exciting questions left on the table – particularly connecting governance structure to collaboration context. We’re also interested in examining specific aspects of collaborations and their contexts that spur successful or unsuccessful transitions.”
The paper titled “Transitioning from planning to implementation: comparing collaborative governance and developmental dynamics in 4 watersheds” appears open access in Policy Sciences (DOI: 10.1007/s11077-025-09583-8). Mark Imperial from University of North Carolina at Wilmington co-authored with Ambrose.
