P30 Innovating Relational Public Management: Exploring and Understanding Boundaries, Wellbeing and Innovation as relational phenomena

Panel Members & Contact Details

Rob Wilson, Professor, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. Email: Rob.Wilson@mmu.ac.uk

Benedetta Trivellato, Associate Professor, University of Milano - Bicocca, Italy. Email: benedetta.trivellato@unimib.it

Paula Rossi, Senior Researcher/Assistant Professor, University of Vaasa, Finland. Email: paula.rossi@uwasa.fi

Max French, Associate Professor, Northumbria University, UK. Email: Max.French@northumbria.ac.uk

Michael Macaulay, Professor, Victoria University, New Zealand. Email: michael.macaulay@vuw.ac.nz

Hannah Hesselgreaves, Professor, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. Email: H.Hesselgreaves@mmu.ac.uk

Summary

This panel explores the emerging field of Relational Public Management, emphasizing innovative, human-centered approaches to service delivery that move beyond transactional models. It invites contributions that examine distributed, integrative, and collaborative organizational practices—such as alliances, co-creation initiatives, and multi-agency partnerships—designed to address complex societal challenges through relational and place-based strategies. The panel welcomes multidisciplinary research using diverse methods, including action research and participatory approaches, to investigate how relationality can enhance wellbeing, boundary-spanning collaboration, and adaptive public management.

Description

In the context of increasing complexity in the public management environment and service delivery, global agencies, policy makers and citizens are demanding significant reform in provision whilst in parallel government and public service organizations strive to respond to local and community-based needs. Operating models of Public Management which foreground transactional means have largely failed and there is a growing movement which seeks to explore ideas of innovative forms of management, capable of responding to complexity through a distributed and relational approach rather than focusing on efficiencies, with generalists rather than specialists, and, perhaps above all, designed around human scale relationships rather than bureaucratic interactions or market approaches (Bartels and Turnbull 2018, French et al 2023, Wilson et al 2024, Bartels et al 2024, Wilson et al 2025). 

This emerging set of loosely coupled organisational and management practices including participatory and action research are fundamental to Relational Public Management. The literature has started to produce a wide variety of relational alternatives to the existing orthodoxies, for instance Human Learning Systems (Lowe et al 2021, French et al 2023), the ‘Liberated Method’ (Smith et al 2025) which indicate new innovations in which we can mobilise public services to address a range of wicked problems areas such as the issues of those with multiple complex needs which can have far reaching effects on the wellbeing of citizens, communities and services. 

This panel seeks to build on the emerging questions of relationality in public management including a range of sociotechnical developments of new and existing tools and approaches which have the potential to accommodate or even amplify relational capabilities in hybrid institutional forms such as alliances, multi-agency collaborations, community assemblies, public-private partnerships, inter-organizational contracting arrangements or co-creation initiatives. 

We encourage scholars with multidisciplinary backgrounds exploring a variety of conceptual, theoretical, empirical and methodological underpinnings of the topic to contribute to this panel. We seek to explore theoretical and/or conceptual issues addressing challenges that focus on relational public management particularly issues related to boundaries, wellbeing and the innovation of relationships in place and context adopting the learning from social complexity researchers. We welcome abstracts exploring relational public management at the and across the boundaries of national, regional and local communities as well as digital environments. Topics can include, for example:

• The role played by different forms of organizational approaches (such as distributed, horizontal, integrative, etc.) on the relational dimension of interactions both within and across organizational boundaries (e.g. in the context of interactions between professionals and service users across boundaries and the production of wellbeing);
• Empirical reports and case studies of methods and tools for relational practices and approaches to public management;
• And finally methodological explorations aimed at better addressing the nature of complex relational, societal and environmental challenges. These methods can include (but are not limited to): Action Research, Participatory Methods, Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) but also mixed method designs and emerging statistical analytical techniques emerging from social complexity.

Relevance

Public Policy making, public administration and public services are increasingly challenged in a complex world brimming with dilemmas where successive attempts at transformation and reform have had limited sustainable or scalable effect. Public Management and Public managers (and the academic community who collaborate with them) are working at the boundaries of these problems seeking to ameliorate and innovate ways and means which have traction with communities and citizens.  This panel seeks to build on the international exploration of Relational Public Management at IRSPM which began in Bologna 25 where two streams were brought together resulting in lively fascinating discussions around the nature and role of RPS drawing from the contributions of over 25 papers.  We seek to continue this journey with colleagues in Australia, New Zealand and beyond to build mobilizable knowledge in contexts which develops academic thinking in Public Management, adjacent areas such as public policy making, administration and also provides insights in practices of transformation, innovation and reform.