The success of service delivery-networks: You can maximize your managerial efforts, but Governments set your frontiers

This paper explores the role that Government should play when networks are established for the provision of public services. Should Government leave and give overall autonomy to the networked organizations? Or should it stay and manage the network activity? In order to answer these questions, we employed the theoretical framework developed by Kort and Klijn (2011) for governance networks, and investigated which relations exist between autonomization, management and performance, as far as service delivery networks are concerned. The results show that in order to make service delivery networks succeed, managerial efforts are important, but autonomy from the Government is also paramount.