Evaluation of Governance Networks

Germany faces a huge challenge. The challenge is about how quick fast internet can be provided for every citizen within the borders. While this sounds quite easy at first sight, it is a very complicated matter. Usually private providers deliver the service, however in rural areas, the benefits are too small to cover the cost for an expansion of fiberglass-network, especially to every house. Therefore, the public hand steps in to fill the gap. This thesis is an research about how governance networks in the German broadband expansion in rural areas operate. Thereby looking into how the networks are structured, what the level of trust is within the networks, what managerial strategies are applied within the networks, and how all of the three influence he perceived outcomes by the partners. The theoretical sources are mainly taken from the excellent work of Provan and Kenis (2008) on governance networks and how they are structured, Klijn and Koppenjan (2016) about managerial strategies within governance networks, the importance of trust by Klijn, Edelenbos and 4 Steijn (2010), and how partners perceive the effectiveness of the network they are participating in, also by Klijn and Koppenjan (2016). Thereby, creating a framework to analyze what has the bigger influence. The thesis starts with explaining why governance networks exist and how they are described before the work of Provan and Kenis (2008) is used to visualize the different forms of networks. The reader continuous with a variety of displayed theories over how governance networks should be evaluated. Important to name are the theories of Milward and Provan (2000) and Provan and Milward (2001), or Chen (2008; 2010) and Chen and Graddy (2010). While all these theories have weaknesses or do not fit to the research construction of this thesis, the work of Klijn and Koppenjan (2016) from the University of Rotterdam provides a framework which complies with all demands for the research. The specific strength of their framework is to find in the approach to look how the network have developed and how the actors within the network perceive such developments. By looking into the form, the applied managerial strategies and trust, this approach matches perfectly to analyze what the influence of every factor is. The research itself consist of a qualitative analysis of interviews to win the data. The interviews were held within four projects in rural areas of northern Germany where the broadband is going to be expanded and the administration or a public actor takes over the control of the project. The results show that the form of a network does not, and managerial strategies do have an influence on the perceived outcomes. If trust has an influence cannot be validated. The reason is that all networks show a high level of trust despite having good or very good results.