Award Date

5-2007

Degree Type

Capstone

Degree Name

Master of Public Administration (MPA)

Department

Public Administration

First Committee Member

Christopher Stream, Chair

Number of Pages

17

Abstract

The purpose of this report is to present to the Harry Reid Center (HRC), the Nevada System of Higher Education and the Department of Energy an evaluation of collaborative effort within the Nuclear Waste Cooperative Agreement of 2003; this “financial assistance” award (as administered by the Harry Reid Center on behalf of the Nevada System of Higher Education) has commissioned this study to analyze its compliance with a stated mission objective of collaboration. The analysis was completed during the months of November 2006 thru April 2007.

The Nevada System of Higher Education (NSHE) has a tremendous opportunity to establish the measurement of ‘Collaboration’ with the Department of Energy (DOE). In order to foster and manage collaboration, it must be defined and understood and then analyzed using a variety of methods.

The Harry Reid Center enlisted the aid of the Public Administration Department of the University of Nevada Las Vegas to complete the study. The faculty and the Program Director of the Nuclear Waste Cooperative Agreement provided oversight. This study allowed graduate students from UNLV to evaluate “collaboration” as it pertained to NSHE and DOE.

This study contains a summary of our methodology, findings and recommendations; information included in the analysis was collected from a limited number of “task managers” representing the Nevada System of Higher Education and the Harry Reid Center. No data was collected from the Department of Energy representatives.

In brief, the results of the study pointed out that communication between NSHE and DOE overall needed improvement. Interpretation of the data revealed that some Principal Investigators (PI) worked harder to maintain a relationship with DOE whereas a noticeable number of principal investigators did not show as good results. Also, NSHE researchers continued to work on tasks even though DOE had been sluggish at times in promptly distributing funds to NSHE. However, organizationally, NSHE proved to be very strong in the area of fiscal responsibility. Finally, the coordination between NSHE and DOE showed mixed results and the satisfaction level was lower because of limited data.

The study produced viable recommendations to assist NSHE in the recording and reporting of collaboration. NSHE can also expand upon the direction of this study and is encouraged to integrate transparent and natural collaboration measures into their operation. The following report describes this collaboration study in detail.

Keywords

Interagency coordination; Nevada System of Higher Education; Radioactive waste repositories – Research; United States. Department of Energy

File Format

pdf

Degree Grantor

University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Language

English

Comments

Appendixes and Presentation attached

Presentation: 18 PowerPoint slides

Additional Files
AppendixA.pdf (162 kB)
Appendix A
AppendixB.pdf (79 kB)
Appendix B
Presentation.pdf (236 kB)
Presentation

Rights

IN COPYRIGHT. For more information about this rights statement, please visit http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

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