Urban public-private collaborations promoting large-scale tourist events are increasingly common. The incentive to collaborate, for urban policy-makers, is the perception of the opportunity for economic development, and yet little is known about factors contributing to the sustainability of such urban cross-sector collaborations. The dissertation accomplishes three objectives. First, it combines resource dependence theory (RDT) and goal congruence theory (GCT) to extend our understanding of how collaborating organizations align their respective organizational goals and manage their interdependencies in complex, urban, inter-sectoral, environments. This is accomplished through use of complementary factors from each theory. Second, using qualitative methods, the research applies RDT and GCT to a level of government where the academic literature addressing the applicability of the theories is scarce. Third, a replicable, literature based, framework is developed that furthers our understanding of goal alignment and goal congruence in urban cross-sector collaborations. The research has practical applications, in that the framework may be used by urban policy practitioners to guide their evaluations of potential collaborators and proposals