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Asia-Pacific Social Science Review

Abstract

Urban areas around the world face challenges in public service production and provision to respond to complex expectations of their diverse publics. In response to these problems, organizationally complex solutions that involve inter-sectoral collaboration and cooperation among public, private for-profit, and nonprofit organizations are frequently “engineered” to create hybrid-organizational arrangements. The current article is premised on a prior assessment that there has been an inadequate application of organizational variables to understand how these organizationally complex forms of local governance emerge and operate. It uses its hybrid organization model in descriptive and analytic assessments of two organizationally complex local public service approaches in urban settings of Southeast Asia. For descriptive purposes, the hybrid approach assists in understanding why and how organizationally complex arrangements emerge in urban governance. For analytic purposes, it considers the consequentiality of these arrangements, particularly in terms of concerns raised by Stoker regarding the challenges that organizational complexity poses to the good governance dimensions of responsiveness, accountability, and transparency. The study finds that hybrid organizational approaches can contribute to good governance in urban areas. It also asserts the importance of assessing contextual factors in making inter-local comparisons in terms of good governance impacts.

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