H. Brinton Milward is the Director of the School of Government and Public Policy at the University of Arizona. He holds the Providence Service Corporation Chair in Public Management.
He was Director of the National Institute for Civil Discourse, which is co-chaired by President George Herbert Walker Bush and President Bill Clinton. 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."
Dr. Milward's research interests revolve around networks and collaboration. The focus of his work has been on understanding how to efficiently and effectively manage networks of organizations that jointly produce public services like health and human services. He has conducted studies of what happens when governments privatize public services, which he terms "governing the hollow state." In addition, since 9/11 he has studied illegal and covert networks that pursue grievances or greed. His articles on "Dark Networks," 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.
Milward received his B.A. from University of Kentucky and his Ph.D. from Ohio State University.