A Decade of Treating Networks Seriously

In the years since O'Toole called for scholars to “[treat] network seriously,” research has progressively improved our understanding of how organizations collaborate in the development and implementation of public policy. This essay reviews recent important texts in the area of policy networks. Together the works illustrate that the scholarship on network governance should move to documenting the diversity and dynamics of policy networks. The article concludes with a discussion of what these texts reveal about the most important standing questions in the study of networks and the methods that need to be brought to bear to investigate these systems.