P17 Managing Across Boundaries: Innovative Approaches to Government Contracting and Public Procurement

Panel Chairs

Corresponding chair

• Rianne Warsen, Erasmus University Rotterdam. warsen@essb.eur.nl

Review-group chair

• Benjamin Brunjes, University of Washington. brunjes@uw.edu

Co-Chairs

• Lachezar Anguelov, Evergreen State College. 
• Jolien Grandia, Erasmus University Rotterdam. 
• Barbara Allen, Victoria University. 

Panel Topic Description

Procurement and Contracting for Governing Polycrises, Wicked Problems, and Cross-Sector Collaboration

Public administrators increasingly confront polycrises, wicked problems, and grand challenges that exceed the capacity of any single organization. Whether responding to natural disasters, public health emergencies, cybersecurity threats, infrastructure failures, or long-term societal challenges, governments increasingly rely on procurement and contracting to mobilize expertise, resources, and capabilities across sectors. As a result, public procurement is more than an administrative function; it is a strategic governance capability through which public organizations build capacity, coordinate complex networks, and create public value under conditions of uncertainty.

Today, public procurement structures cross-sector relationships, facilitates collaboration, promotes innovation, and advances broader public goals such as resilience, equity, sustainability, and democratic accountability. These developments have important implications for public management, as governments increasingly depend on procurement to govern complex interorganizational relationships while balancing efficiency, accountability, and the public interest.

This panel welcomes papers that investigate how public organizations use procurement and government contracting to address complex public challenges, particularly through collaborative governance, relational contracting, and innovative procurement practices. We welcome theoretical, empirical, methodological, and practice-oriented contributions employing quantitative or qualitative methods, systematic literature reviews, and meta-analyses. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• The changing nature of procurement and contracting practices in public organizations, including digital procurement, innovation, current public law issues*, and evolving public management approaches.
• The role of procurement and contracting in strengthening organizational capacity, resilience, preparedness, and responses to crises and uncertainty.
• The management of cross-sector partnerships, including contracts and negotiations among governments and their public, private, and nonprofit partners.
• The design and management of procurement processes and contracts that foster collaboration, accountability, innovation, and effective public service delivery.
• The professional skills and organizational capacities required of procurement and contract managers to navigate uncertainty, collaborate across sectors, and manage complex relationships.
• Ethics, accountability, transparency, and democratic governance in procurement and contracting.
• Equity, sustainability, and other strategic policy objectives pursued through procurement and contracting.
• Research advancing existing theoretical perspectives—including transaction cost economics, agency theory, resource dependence, and related approaches—or introducing new theoretical frameworks for understanding procurement and contracting.

Authors of accepted papers will present their work in thematic panel sessions, with discussants providing detailed feedback and session chairs identifying broader implications for public management scholarship. We also hope to continue fostering collaboration across the international procurement research community, explore opportunities for special issues in public management and public procurement journals, and strengthen connections with the ASPA Section on Procurement and Contract Management (SPCM).

*For paper proposals on the intersection of public management and law, dr. Benjamin Descamps (University of Ghent) supports the panel chairs in reviewing the paper proposals.

Relevance to Public Management Scholarship and/or Conference Theme

This panel directly addresses the conference theme by exploring how public procurement and contracting enable governments to respond to polycrises, govern wicked problems, and build public sector capacity under conditions of uncertainty. As governments increasingly rely on private firms, nonprofit organizations, and other partners to deliver essential public services and respond to emergencies, procurement has evolved beyond its traditional transactional role. Procurement and contracting management have become strategic governance capabilities through which public organizations coordinate across sectors, mobilize expertise, and create public value while balancing accountability, resilience, and democratic legitimacy. Despite its central role in how governments respond to crises and govern across sectors, procurement remains underrepresented in broader public management scholarship on resilience, wicked problems, and institutional capacity.

By examining topics such as relational contracting, collaborative procurement, emergency procurement, supplier resilience, civic engagement through purchasing, and equity- and sustainability-oriented contracting, this panel highlights how procurement practices shape governments’ ability to prepare for, respond to, and recover from complex public challenges. Procurement systems and contracting arrangements can strengthen—or undermine—organizational resilience, interorganizational coordination, and public trust, making them central to contemporary debates about public management and governance.

The panel also engages directly with questions surrounding digital transformation, including e-procurement, artificial intelligence, and other emerging technologies that are reshaping public purchasing while creating new opportunities and governance challenges. Finally, by inviting scholarship that bridges established theories (e.g., transaction cost economics, agency theory, and resource dependence) with emerging perspectives on collaborative governance, resilience, and institutional capacity, the panel provides a forum for advancing theory and practice.

By positioning procurement as a strategic mechanism through which governments build capacity, coordinate across sectors, and govern under uncertainty, this panel contributes directly to the conference's goal of understanding how public organizations can foster more resilient, effective, and democratic societies.