Toward a Critical Theory of Collaborative Governance

Abstract

In recent years, there has been a notable shift toward collaborative governance as a theoretical and practical framework for public administration and management, and in light of this shift, public administration scholars have called for refocused attention on the relationship between bureaucracy and democracy. This article responds to this call by turning to the critical social theory of Jürgen Habermas. It reviews relevant elements of Habermas’s broader social theory that illuminate the tension between bureaucracy and democracy in the context of collaborative governance. Collaborative governance is best viewed from the perspective of a critical theory attuned to the normative and political stakes of collaborative arrangements and practices. In the conclusion, the specific contributions made to collaborative governance from a critical theory perspective are discussed. The article ends with a plea for the folding of critical democratic pedagogy into the training of public managers and administrators. Public managers should be trained to see the potentials of collaboration from the perspectives of both administrator and citizen in order to see not only how processes of governance or management take place but also how those processes could and should advance the cause of democracy.

Notes

1 The question of whether this story is itself a believable one in the context of the postcolonial and poststructuralist critiques cannot be addressed in this article. For Habermas’s response to poststructuralism, see Habermas (1991). For more on critical theory in the context of postcolonialism, see Allen (2016).

2 One reason that the realization of genuine democracy is unrealistic, Habermas implies, is that systems representatives have few incentives to activate it, since it would “expose the contradiction between administratively socialized production and a still private form of acquiring the produced values” (1974, p. 648). On this reading, public administrators rely on “civil privatism” rather than false consciousness—caretakers of administrative systems hope to depend on “mass loyalty” conjoined with apathy, without (dangerous) participation.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

David W. McIvor

David McIvor is Associate Professor of Political Science at Colorado State University.