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Command and control mechanisms associated with bureaucracy are giving way to much more complicated relationships for the delivery of health and human services. Nonprofit organizations, private firms, and governments all play a role in the new world of devolved public policy. The unit of analysis in this world is the network. Networks, while less stable overall than private firms or governments, have stable features whose contours are shaped by law, funding structures, and norms and values shared by members of the network.

This chapter examines various approaches to governing networks among public agencies, nonprofit organizations, and private firms that deliver taxpayer-funded services. The governance problem is how to design institutions that can be effective in a world where few organizations have the power to accomplish their missions alone (Bryson and Crosby 1992, pp. 3-21). In health, mental health, children's services, drug and alcohol prevention, and welfare, responsibility for policy design has devolved to state governments, and policy implementation now occurs in a decentralized network of local government agencies, nonprofit organizations, and private firms. In" The Maker," Jorge Luis Borges wrote of a bureau of cartography in a fictional South American country whose sole task was to construct a map as big as the country. As in this story, the danger of network analysis is creating a network as complex as the reality it is supposed to represent. This is a danger we do our best to avoid.