The integration and co-production of human services is creating a wave of experimentation with new forms of governance that are capable of providing strategic direction to loosely coupled nonprofit organizations, and also spanning the public and nonprofit sectors under conditions of uncertainty. ‘Community hubs’ – co-located, coordinated, citizen-centric services and resources – are one approach to integration that have been tried in Australia (Tennant et al. 2002), the UK (Needham, 2014) and elsewhere, and are currently in the early stages of development in Canada’s largest province, Ontario.
The fundamental challenge for the creation of suitable governance mechanisms of these hubs is to balance jurisdiction-wide policy consistency with place-based differentiation. A structure needs to be formalized within government to break down the existing funding, contracting and programmatic silos of individual departments without asserting a new form of centralized control over government-nonprofit relationships. In addition, the governance of the place-based hubs needs to be responsive to local conditions and stakeholders (Gnan et al., 2013) while potentially conforming to a common province-wide approach.
The early stage of Ontario’s community hubs affords a distinctive opportunity to analyze the strategic considerations that affect the design and implementation of governance mechanisms for integrated services. This paper aims both to contribute to theories of corporate governance in the context of co-production and inform professional practice by assessing promising practices. Combining a contingency perspective on nonprofit governance (Bradshaw, 2009; Harrow and Phillips, 2013) with the literatures on network governance and on service integration/co-production (Osborne and Strokosch, 2013; Pestoff et al., 2012) the paper first identifies the factors that affect governance in such cross-sectoral, network-oriented situations. Second, it examines the lessons learned from the governance of integrated services in other jurisdictions (Stone et al., 2013). Third, it presents the case study of Ontario, drawing on interviews with key informants in government and lead nonprofits, to assess how the design of community hub governance is responding to the contingencies of a new service environment.
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