Dr. H. Brinton Milward is the Director of the National Institute for Civil Discourse and Director of the School of Government and Public Policy at the University of Arizona where he holds the Providence Service Corporation Chair in Public Management. He has been president of two national associations: the Public Management Research Association and the National Association of Schools of Public Administration and Affairs. He is a Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration and in 2010 won the Distinguished Research Award given by the National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration and the American Society for Public Administration for a “coherent body of work over a career.” Milward’s research interests revolve around networks and collaboration. He has studied organizational networks for his entire career. A major line of his work has focused on understanding how to efficiently and effectively manage networks of organizations that jointly produce public services like health care and mental health. He has conducted studies of what happens when governments privatize public services, which in the literature is known as “governing the hollow state.”

He has also written on the challenge of collaborative management. After services are privatized, how do governments ensure that contracts and collaboration are effectively implemented by private firms and nonprofits that may have different goals than the government? A major new focus for Milward’s work has been studies of illegal and covert networks that pursue grievances or greed. His articles on “Dark Networks,” which include case studies from open-source materials, have been widely cited for their application of network analysis and management theory to terrorist networks, human trafficking, drug smuggling, and other illegal activities. His particular foci have been the governance of dark networks, their trajectories, and accounting for their relative degrees of effectiveness and resilience.