A Framework for Understanding Parks Partnerships

Public-private partnerships are agreements among multiple public and private parties to risk money, time, influence, or other assets in pursuit of joint goals.⁵

STRUCTURE

A partnership structure is defined by the number of partners and their relative status as "general" or "limited" partners. General partners control business operations and are at risk for all losses of the enterprise not borne by the limited partners. Limited partners lose only what they invest and gain only what the partnership specifies as appropriate.

Parks agencies and their primary nonprofit partners usually have the most invested (and the most to lose) in parks partnerships—they are the general partners. Limited partners are usually less-invested constituent groups. Over time, the general partners usually stay the same, but often, limited partners come and go as the activities of the partnership evolve and draw upon different interests and contributions.

Basic Elements of Partnerships

Structure One or more "general partners" and one or more "limited partners." General partners exercise project control and are primarily responsible, and at risk, for the success of the initiative. Limited partners are project constituents. Their interests and risks are limited to the amount of their contribution. Control Responsible for strategic direction and operational decisions. Assets and Liabilities Strengths and weaknesses of: Resources Organizational Capacity Public Image Constituencies Risks Potential loss of contributed assets, due to issues of commitment, capacity, strategy, returns, and organizational culture.

CONTROL

In a business partnership, the general partners usually control operations, and limited partners play almost no role in decisionmaking. In parks partnerships, however, limited partners typically do have some voice in management. In the Urban Parks Initiative, general partners created a variety of councils, advisory groups, and other bodies. Limited partners involved in these bodies generally have some say as partnerships evolve. Over time, the level of involvement by limited partners in management changes. In the Urban Parks Initiative, involvement by limited partners generally has declined as partnerships have matured past design and into day-to-day implementation.

ASSETS AND LIABILITIES

Each partner brings both assets and liabilities to a partnership. Assets can include resources, organizational strength, public image, and the constituencies each partner counts on for support. Liabilities include shortfalls in resources, organizational weaknesses, poor public image, and weak constituent support. One mark of a well-functioning partnership is that joint assets are strengthened and liabilities reduced through cooperation. The value of assets and the cost of liabilities change over time. At the early stages of a partnership, the public image of the parties may convey substantial advantages or disadvantages in joint attempts to attract limited partners to the initiative. As partnerships mature, partners' ability to commit money and voluntary support to parks may predominate.

RISKS

Partners risk losing some or all of the resources they contribute to a partnership. In the Urban Parks Initiative, we detected five varieties of risk. These pertain to whether or not the partners are (1) genuinely committed to keeping their promises to other partners, (2) capable of carrying out these promises, (3) able to craft sensible strategies to accomplish partnership goals, (4) getting the returns they expected from the partnership, and (5) able to communicate effectively with their partners even though their organizational cultures may be very different.

Stages in a Public-Private Parks Partnership

One of the least understood aspects of partnerships is how they change over time. The sequencing below arrays the typical stages of a parks development project. It can be modified for other kinds of efforts, including initiatives to improve parks programming. Predevelopment A few core members of a partnership debate project feasibility. Constituents have not been mobilized; risks are low and confined to the general partners, who tightly control project activities and pledge resources to the effort but do not yet commit them. Design Planning begins for land purchase, construction, financing, programming, and management. The number of players expands, risk levels rise, and general partners lose some ability to control project activities. During this stage, partners' most valuable assets are their public image and their ability to mobilize constituents. This is particularly true when a rapid increase in limited partners with cash is needed. Implementation This stage can include land acquisition, construction, and programming. Financial commitments made during the design phase are called in. partnership members usually don't change, although attrition in limited partners can occur. The value of mobilized constituents begins to decline, and the value of funding and organizations' resources rises dramatically. Management Project management includes responsibility for maintenance, security, ongoing programming, community outreach and communication, and other recurring tasks. most limited partners drop out of active participation, although they can be mobilized if issues important to their interests surface. Risks are fairly low and are limited to the general partners, who maintain high control over project activities.

STRUCTURE

Urban Parks Initiatives: Initial Findings

Most public agencies have moved toward performance-based park development, programming, and management—counteracting traditional bureaucratic inefficiencies and stretching limited dollars further. Most nonprofit partners can respond flexibly to park improvement and fiancing opportunities. A real strength has been their ability to mobilize community residents to support parks, even where this has not been a traditional organizational focus.

The General Partners: Parks Agencies and Parks Support Nonprofits

The general partners have the most at stake in the success of the partnership. In the initiatives we reviewed, the core partners were municipal parks agencies, nonprofit parks support groups, and the Trust for Public Land.⁶ The general partners have committed to play leadership roles in the creation of new parks or the substantial renovation and improvement of existing facilities. They are primarily responsible for project planning and design, fundraising, procurement, community organizing, programming, and facilities maintenance. Although limited partners are partially vested in the success of all of these activities, the general partners have most at risk.

The general partners bear most of the burden of keeping the partnership intact over time. Unlike limited partners, whose interest is motivated by the demands of supporters with narrow concerns—for example, a soccer association hoping to secure more playing fields—general partners serve multiple interests. Because partnership projects change over time, the mix of limited partners changes. The general partners, however, remain the same.

Tapping into the Appeal of Parks to Special Interest Constituencies

Civic Culture Parks can help further an interchange among diverse races and groups, and parks offer a venue that can support expressions and celebrations of community and neighborhood solidarity, history, and culture. Community-Building Parks can support the work of those seeking ways to engage community members in projects that can help improve the quality of life in communities, and in particular parks can support efforts to improve adjacent neighborhoods and stimulate business development and job creation. Environmentalism Already representative of the core ideals of groups interested in "greening" issues, parks can support activities such as ecosystem restoration, urban forestry, and community gardening. Historic Preservation Parks are particularly meaningful to individuals who see them as places to explore landscape architecture or as settings for major arts, cultural, and scientific institutions. Natural History Parks are valued by those interested in exploring nature, ecology, and other natural sciences as a scientific endeavor or for educational purposes.

The Limited Partners: Constituent Groups

The limited partners are defined by the interests that constituent members share. In the Urban Parks Initiative, these constituents have included groups ranging from neighborhood associations to regional watershed protection associations. The following table lists some interests that bind constituent members active in parks improvement.

Our field investigations found, not surprisingly, that parks appeal to an extraordinary range of constituents. Groups respond to appeals with particular resonance for them—for example, a bicycling club may contribute volunteers to improve a greenway—but they also share interests held more intensely by others—the celebration of ethnic communities, for instance. Indeed, park supporters may not even be park users. Natural history, environmentalism, recreation, historic preservation, and community-building appeal to many who do not use parks.

How Constituent Interests Overlap in Urban Park Initiatives

Greenway development and programming initiatives in one city in the Urban Parks Initiative were of great appeal to schoolteachers striving to make their natural science curriculum more relevant to inner-city youth, who often feel disconnected from their natural environment. Three cities in the initiative have emphasized parks as a vehicle to steer at-risk youth into positive activities. This has connected parks departments and police departments in new ways. Design of new neighborhood parks in four cities has created fresh opportunities to engage universities interested in preparing graduate students for careers in community planning, landscape architecture, and other fields. One city has embraced parks as a community development asset, resulting in both citywide and neighborhood-by-neighborhood links with community development corporations and their financial and technical support systems Greenway projects in three cities have productively engaged regional environmental organizations and state agencies responsible for watershed protection and linked them with community residents who previously viewed parks only as recreational space.

We also found quite a few emerging relationships between parks agencies and partners that normally would be considered outside of the natural parks constituencies. While not all of the cities in the Urban Parks Initiative have taken full advantage of constituency-building opportunities, where coalitions have worked well, the nonprofit partner tends to have a strong track record in mobilizing constituencies, delivering programs, and building relationships with local funders.

CONTROL

The partners' first important decisions pertain to control: over which decisions can limited partners "cast votes"? In our research, we found it helpful to think about four areas of partnership decisionmaking: governance, project and program design, implementation, and management. Governance includes decisions on who may participate in the partnership, their level of involvement, the allocation of decisionmaking authority, and the terms under which the partnership continues or is dissolved. The general partners almost always have the final word on issues of governance. Control over design, implementation, and management issues varied widely across the partnerships we studied.

Urban parks partnerships have devised a number of methods to structure participation in decisionmaking, ranging from advisory bodies to mobilize constituent support and solicit advice to governing councils authorized to resolve major issues. We have seen partnerships restructure participation over time; some partnerships establish advisory councils early on to assist in project and program design issues but later turn to formal governing bodies to oversee parks or facilities management. Apart from advisory and governing bodies, limited partners sometimes participate indirectly in partnership decisions through membership on the nonprofit general partner's board of directors. This sometimes becomes an alternative to other methods of participation.

The amount of control exercised by the limited partners can change over time. As partnerships form, the general partners usually control major decisions about partnership structure and purposes. But as the partnership moves into the design of major facilities or programs, and limited partners pledge their contributions, control is no longer so tightly held. Limited partners begin to exercise influence, if not outright control, over major project decisions. Thereafter, throughout implementation and management, the limited partners may continue to share in operational decisionmaking or withdraw from active participation, or both, as the number of partners changes and the issues before the partnership evolve.

ASSETS AND LIABILITIES

Financial Assets and Liabilities

Public agencies.
All agencies depend on appropriations. Most can count on some intergovernmental aid (community development block grants, for example), and some have dedicated revenue sources. Increasingly, parks departments have established enterprise funds, supported by fees for services. Although total funding may not be enough to allow agency directors to maintain all of their facilities adequately and take on new tasks, funding tends to be stable from year to year. Over several years, budgets may rise or fall, but they tend to do so incrementally.

No public agency official we interviewed was satisfied with the size of his or her budget for maintenance, basic programs, or facilities repair and replacement. Although one or two agencies had rebounded from years of cuts, most had suffered consistent declines.

In every city, parks departments had either cut maintenance budgets or shifted some responsibility for maintenance to nonprofit agencies or, in one case, to other city agencies. Consequently, agency officials are understandably reluctant to invest in new facilities that present a future maintenance burden.

Nonprofits.
Nonprofit agencies can tap funding sources unavailable to public agencies, including donations from individuals, corporations, and private foundations. Unlike public agencies, nonprofits are flexible in their ability to use these funds to pursue new programs, and they are free to develop innovative ideas and solicit contributions to support them. Although corporate and foundation funders do place restrictions on their grants, they typically allow at least modest room to innovate.

Nearly all of the nonprofit partners in the initiatives we studied, however, had to spend substantial time fundraising. Multi-year grants were uncommon, and although some funders could be counted on for support each year, amounts were unpredictable. As a result, nonprofit groups, particularly new ones, found it difficult to make credible long-term commitments.

As previously noted, under the best circumstances, partners' strengths complement each other. In this case, for example, a nonprofit partner may be able to use philanthropic funding to create a new youth development program but not have sufficiently predictable long-term funding to keep the program going. A parks agency, on the other hand, may not have the budget flexibility to create the program initially but may pick it up as an ongoing program once its value is demonstrated.

Organizational Assets and Liabilities

Public agencies.
On the asset side, public agencies bring an infrastructure of stable staff, management systems, planning and budgeting procedures, and other competencies, allowing them to plan, implement, and manage large projects.

Parks agencies typically employ large numbers of workers and manage assets of considerable value. Most have a well-developed organizational infrastructure, consisting of multiple operating divisions responsible for capital facilities development, landscape and forestry, facilities maintenance, and recreational programs. Offices responsible for strategic planning, budgeting, human resources, and contracting, among others, support the work of these divisions. This accumulated set of staff and functions adds up to a considerable capacity to take on the work of parks creation, improvement, and management.

One drawback of all this accumulated capacity, however, is that it often comes with highly routine procedures, making it difficult for agency heads to innovate. Both public and private partners expressed frustration with the slow pace of agency work, particularly in the area of contracting and procurement. We also found instances where planning and design became laden with unnecessary steps and procedures, which lengthened the time needed to implement fairly simple projects or produced designs that were unresponsive to the community. Some agency managers acknowledged that their organizations were unnecessarily inefficient due to cumbersome procedures or staff attitudes. Several directors have embarked on efforts to inculcate an ethic of citizen responsiveness among staff, in keeping with recent customer service trends in public administration.

Nonprofits.
Nonprofit agencies have justly earned a reputation for being flexible—but also for being thinly staffed and not always properly managed. None of the nonprofit partners in the Urban Parks Initiative are large enough to have created cumbersome decisionmaking procedures and rigid internal divisions of labor. Rather, most have rather lean staffs who share project responsibilities when needed. Although we did not find extensive use of paid consultants, who can absorb workload at peak times or provide technical advice, most nonprofit partners did rely on boards, advisory committees, and other sources of specialized expertise. Most of the nonprofits we reviewed had accepted unforeseen project and program responsibilities, reshuffling staff to take advantage of funding opportunities or respond to project difficulties.

However, we also found nonprofit partners that lacked the capacity to follow through on commitments. One organization in the Urban Parks Initiative could not meet its project responsibilities when funding from other sources dried up. Another nonprofit responded to an external grant opportunity so it could support its programs in low-income areas, but senior management underestimated the commitment needed to carry out the grant effectively. Most of the nonprofit partners found that the commitments they had accepted strained the capacity of their relatively small staffs, although most managed to complete tasks successfully.

Public Perceptions as Assets and Liabilities

Public agencies.
Public goodwill is an asset that both nonprofit organizations and public agencies contribute to parks partnerships. Our interviews revealed that public parks have substantial public legitimacy; indeed, in one city, surveys showed the parks department as the most highly rated city service.

But if public parks agencies usually can call on significant goodwill, it typically is passive. Parks agencies have difficulty mobilizing private financial contributions or volunteers. The public can view care and maintenance of parks as "the government's job." All of the agencies in the initiatives we studied used volunteers, and some solicited monetary support. However, most had encountered the popular attitude that "government should do it."

Nonprofits.
Nonprofits usually can access and use community credibility in ways that parks agencies cannot. Because nonprofits are neither "in it for the money" nor supported by tax dollars, citizens usually are willing to volunteer their attention, labor, and money. Nonprofits can solicit support not available to public agencies from charitable foundations and individuals, including from citywide "elites" (some of whom sit on partners' boards), the broader public, and residents of low-income communities. In the case of low-income communities in particular, nonprofits can give private partners an entrée that may have been denied a government agency, especially if the agency is viewed by the community as having historically neglected its concerns. Nonprofit access here is not automatic or sustained uncritically. The nonprofit partners have to deliver.

While nonprofit partners can claim a special status in their appeals for public support, they also risk raising expectations among community residents that cannot be satisfied easily. For example, one nonprofit partner successfully drew community residents into decisionmaking about parks improvement through design charettes but subsequently could not persuade the city agency to accept the community's recommendations. Other partners have encouraged participation of community residents in cleanup efforts and other volunteer activities, only to see enthusiasm wane when city-scheduled improvements lagged behind the community's expected timing.

Constituency Assets and Liabilities

Constituencies may be the strongest potential asset each general partner has. Support from environmentalists, for example, has been very helpful in securing state open space funding. Support from bicycling groups has likewise been important in helping local initiatives claim state allocations of federal transportation funding.

Public agencies.
Parks agencies can tap a wide range of natural constituencies to support their activities. These include parents with children in parks-sponsored programs, participants in adult recreation programs, adults who use facilities on a casual basis, and neighborhood groups that advocate for city services. These represent a power base that can be mobilized when decisionmakers are determining park and recreation funding issues.

Most of the parks departments in the Urban Parks Initiative have not reached out to nontraditional constituencies. Such unconventional constituents could include groups interested in the natural sciences, supporters of public education, and community development practitioners. These represent an untapped financial and volunteer resource for almost all of the parks departments included in our research.

Nonprofits.
The nonprofit partners in the Urban Parks Initiative can be extremely helpful in tapping these broader constituencies. Partly because the Urban Parks Initiative encourages this emphasis, each of the nonprofit partners has examined the role of parks in community development and, in so doing, attracted support from community organizations, foundations, public agencies, and other groups with a special focus on neighborhoods. In almost all of the greenways or trails projects, nonprofits have devoted considerable effort to attracting the political and financial support of environmental groups, bicycling associations, community schools, and others with an interest in preserving or studying the natural environment. Among the most interesting efforts to attract nontraditional supporters to parks improvements were nonprofits reaching out to cultural and scientific institutions, including universities and museums, and their supporters.

While these new constituencies are important, their support may be comparatively shallow because parks are not central to their primary interest. This may be particularly true where efforts to mobilize broader constituency support for parks tend to be new. Nonprofits and their public partners have not had time to deliver the benefits these constituents expect. One of the major questions surrounding the Urban Parks Initiative is whether nontraditional parks constituents can be drawn into public support for parks improvement and management in a sustained way.

RISKS

Partners in the Urban Parks Initiative are working to balance these and other risks. The public agency, for example, can bring stable funding that allows consistent project implementation in spite of ups and downs in the nonprofit's cash flow. The private partners, on the other hand, can bring new money for innovative programs that would be unaffordable to underfunded parks departments. In another example, the public sector brings a large and internally diverse staff that can sustain a development program over time, while the nonprofit's organizational flexibility enables it to take on some tasks far more efficiently, such as mobilizing volunteers to construct a playground quickly, a task that would have taken far longer if handled through the Parks and Recreation Department.

The public sector's claim on popular goodwill can help shield the partnership from the erosion of community support if progress is slower than community residents expect. At the same time, the nonprofit's connections in the community can help overcome popular indifference toward, or even suspicion of, public agencies. In one partnership we reviewed, the nonprofit's credibility with a suspicious community helped the organization broker agreements between residents and public agencies to move a stalled greenways project forward.

WHAT CHALLENGES DO PARTNERSHIPS FACE?

Varieties of Partnership Challenges

Capacity Shortfalls Partners fail to perform agreed-upon tasks because they lack the capacity to do so. Even good-faith commitments aren't fulfilled due to failure of leadership, organizational weaknesses, lack of funding, or inadequate planning and management. Inadequate Commitment A partnership collapses because one or more partners do not commit fully to collaboration. At the extreme, a partner may make a promise with no intent to honor it. More commonly, honest promises are forfeited as other tasks ascend in priority. Flawed Strategies The partners agree to a flawed strategy. Although it is pursued by capable and well-intentioned partners, the complexity of the task or the inadequacy of the approach produces poor results, thereby discouraging the partners from continuing. Insufficient Returns Payoffs don't justify the investment, even though partners are both capable and committed. For example, a nonprofit may believe that a successful joint project with a public agency will heighten visibility, thereby increasing donations. If no increases result, it may forsake future cooperation. Failures to Communicate Communication, leadership style, organizational culture, and other gaps are so profound that even though parties agree on strategies, are capable, and are committed to collaboration, implementation becomes so "expensive" that the parties don't invest further in the joint effort.

In the Urban Parks Initiative, two risks predominate: inadequate capacity and inadequate commitment. Capacity problems result when a partner's liabilities outweigh its assets, or its assets are simply inadequate to the task. More troubling are inadequate commitments, which most often come in the form of competing promises that crowd out pledges made to the other partners. For example, a parks agency commits to a neighborhood parks improvement project but fails to advance it in project managers' lists or puts it far down the priority list in its annual budget request. To reduce commitment failures, partners must keep their joint venture near the top of each other's agendas.

How Do Partners Sustain Each Other's Commitment?

Accountability trumps flagging commitment. Partners must have ways to hold one another accountable for results. Partners in the Urban Parks Initiative have devised strategies to ensure that each partner delivers on its commitments, summarized below.

Risk Reduction Strategies: How to Keep Cooperation Going

Confront poor performance, clarify responsibilities, and reconcile Unless partners confront poor performance, problems will likely persit. When performance is restored, partners must forgive previous lapses. Otherwise, cooperation ends. Accountibility usually is aided by clear understanding on who does what. This is even more important when parties share joint responsibility for project tasks, as do the partners in most of the Urban Parks Initiative projects. Raise the stakes, increase rewards. As partners see more value in participating in the partnership, the risk that a partner will reduce its commitment declines and the cost of being excluded from the partnership goes up. Other partners have more stake in monitoring performance, raising the liklihood that poor performance will be discovered. Change the number of partners. As partners increase, the risk that any one partner will fail to hold up its end declines. The risk of being detected and the number of parties that can sanction failure go up. Lengthen time horizons. The willingness to cooperate goes up as time horizons lengthen: partners who take the long view are less tempted to seek short-term advantages that jeopardize future gains from cooperation. Make sure contributions and payoffs are public. If each partner's investments, payoffs, and strategies are clear to all involved (and, in some cases, made visible to the general public), any partner can judge the fairness of who gets what and judge other partners' performance.

Confront poor performance, clarify responsibilities, and reconcile.
In the Urban Parks Initiative, we found that confusion about who does what in a parks partnership can jeopardize community confidence and residents' willingness to participate in partner-sponsored activities. Some ambiguity in the initial stages of partnership formation can be useful. Assigning roles can be difficult; partners in some of the parks initiatives have found it helpful to postpone decisions until they can establish a reasonably solid working relationship. Nevertheless, a number of initiatives are approaching the point where successful sorting of roles—in particular, which of the management and maintenance functions will be assigned to whom-has become important to the long-term success of the initiative.

In one city, for example, the greenway partnership relies on several parties to carry out diverse tasks. When one entity discontinued a task important to the partnership because of staff changes, the others confronted the group and clarified roles. The partners acknowledged the problem and identified the resources to continue on in response to the partner's new situation.

Raise the stakes, increase rewards.
Initially, the greenways project in one city was little more than a feasibility study and a vision. Wider commitment began to gel when the nonprofit partner secured implementation funding, thus raising the stakes for the others in the newly formed partnership. Now, partners are joined together in many ways, including by a sense of collective vulnerability to any single partner's opting out. The rewards are increased by having stronger, more equal partners.

Change the number of partners.
If one partner has made a commitment to perform certain tasks, other partners typically find out about that commitment quickly. They become, in turn, the informal monitors of performance. In some instances, increasing the number of monitors—other partners—keeps the pressure on other members whose commitments may be in doubt.

Staff changes in the city parks department of one participant in the Urban Parks Initiative left a void in the leadership of a major project. To help sustain the agency's commitment, the partnership members, which include some parks employees, have invited cross-jurisdictional staff and community leaders to join the partnership. An ex officio advisory group will be formed to ensure that former members of the partnership can continue to play consulting roles.

Lengthen time horizons.
Design and construction of greenway segments in one city could have been swiftly completed by the city alone—but a key partner wanted to ensure real community involvement. The partnership agreed to a process that initially generated tension when it threw off project timelines. In the end, community involvement justified lengthening the time horizons.

Make sure contributions and payoffs are public.
Keeping "cards face up" is a healthy partnership strategy. In one city, the partnership created for each park project begins with frank discussions of what each member can and will do for the project. Both the nonprofit and the parks agency honor their commitment to provide full reports to the other partners, including community representatives. Trust is established because the partners are respected and consulted.

Promises are more likely to be kept when individuals publicly accept responsibility for delivering on commitments and can commit others as well. In several initiatives, highly visible mayoral or city manager support became an important assurance that the public agency would deliver on its promises.

5. Our view of partnerships through the lens of assets, risks, and accountibility was stimulated by work on collective action problems. See Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, Cambridge University, 1995.

6. The Trust for Public Land is a national intermediary organization devoted to the acquisition and preservation of public land for recreational, environmental, open space, and other public purposes.

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