Implementing collaborative governance: models, experiences, and challenges

ABSTRACT

This paper introduces the reader to a special issue focused on Collaborative Governance implementation. The purpose of this symposium is to advance our understanding of the cross-cutting and complex issues of collaborative governance implementation, which include: (a) supporting the collaborative process through innovative models and methods for enhancing a shared understanding of community problems and outcomes, (b) fostering the interplay between service policy and service delivery, and (c) combining a public service view with an institutional and interinstitutional view.

KEYWORDS:

• Collaborative Governance
• Implementation
• Outcomes

Introduction

Scholars in public administration have been advocating for greater attention to implementing governance mechanisms to solve some of the ‘wicked’ problems in public service delivery (Howell‐Moroney 2008; Ansell and Gash 2007; Bianchi 2021). Public services are inter-organizational processes by nature, and they require the collaborative efforts of all the actors involved in the delivery, including the users for generating value (Osborne, Radnor, and Nasi 2013). Fragmentation is often a main cause of inconsistency in the attempt to improve community outcomes (Borgonovi, Bianchi, and Rivenbark 2019). Discrepancies between short-term outputs and long-term outcomes, along with unintended side-effects of prior implemented policies, are often symptomatic from attempts by individual organizations to fix community problems.

‘Wicked’ problems¹ cannot be clustered within single organizational boundaries because they possess dynamic and complex characteristics, involving multi-level, multi-actor, and multi-sectoral challenges (Head and Alford 2013; Laegreid and Rykkja 2014; Bianchi 2015). Through collaborative governance, a public-sector institution involves other community stakeholders in carrying out a strategic learning process aimed at framing public value, its drivers, and the strategic resources needed to affect community outcomes (Ansell and Gash 2007). This learning process supports the design of ‘robust’ policies, implying an outcome-based view. This entails a co-design, co-production, and co-assessment of policies from community stakeholders, with the goal of pursuing community resilience and sustainable socio-economic development (Bovaird 2007; Osborne 2021; Torfing and Ansell 2017). The described perspective ‘posits both a plural state, where multiple interdependent actors contribute to the delivery of public services, and a pluralist state, where multiple processes inform the policy-making system’ (Osborne 2010, 9).

The purpose of this symposium is to advance our understanding of the cross-cutting and complex issues of collaborative governance implementation, which include: (a) supporting the collaborative process with the use of models and methods to improve a shared understanding of community problems and outcomes, (b) enhancing the interplay between service policy and service delivery within a collaborative governance environment to specifically address these problems and outcomes, and (c) combining a public service view with an institutional and interinstitutional view to overcome the traditional myopic and bounded perspectives of public organizations. We begin this introduction to our symposium with a literature review on collaborative governance implementation before summarizing the six articles contained herein. We then conclude by offering some recommendations on future research opportunities of this complex topic to continue the advancement of the theory and practice of collaborative governance implementation to address and alleviate community problems.

Implementing collaborative governance

Despite the substantial literature on collaborative governance, the maturation process of knowledge and practice of the field is still developing at a significant pace both from a conceptual and an empirical standpoint. Such phenomenon also is witnessed by the variegated terminology contained in the literature around related concepts encompassing public governance, networks, collaboration, and public value. Similar terms also have been used within the field, implying affinities, differences, and connections among them. Examples include collaborative governance (Ansell and Gash 2007), new public governance (Osborne 2010), policy networks (Klijn and Koppenjan 2000; Rhodes 1990),² network governance (Rhodes 2017), cross-sector collaboration (Bryson, Crosby, and Stone 2006), public value governance (Bryson, Crosby, and Bloomberg 2014), participatory governance (Fung and Wright 2001), holistic governance (Perry et al. 2002), integrated governance (Hood 2005), and interactive governance (Torfing et al. 2012). They all refer to multi-actor collaboration, usually led by a public sector organization aimed at building consensus among stakeholders on a formal set of policies designed and implemented to generate public value.

Klijn and Koppenjan (2000) suggested that the implementation of collaborative governance requires complex interactions between large numbers of interdependent actors. However, the scholars maintained that this interaction is not simple or spontaneous, requiring different types of game management and network constitution to achieve some level of success. Peters (2015) even suggested that a perspective of democracy and inclusion is even admirable, before concluding that openness, agreement, decision-making, and coordination within a collaborative model may be difficult to achieve. Therefore, collaboration is not an automatic effect from developing interdependent networks within a community, which may require the notion of craftsmanship to produce public value (Bardach 1998; Peters 2015). Another layer of complexity when implementing collaborative governance is the pursuit of sustainable outcomes, which must be identified, agreed upon, and evaluated based on consensus from community stakeholders.

The need to understand the collaborative process (Ansell and Gash 2007) and how it affects and is affected by outcomes (Crosby and Bryson 2010; Klijn et al. 2010) also is critically important to the implementation literature, explaining how and why the design of ‘formal’ organizational factors (protocols, rules, structures, and roles) to enable collaboration may or may not generate the intended outcomes. The literature includes the relevance of ‘informal factors’ (e.g., facilitative leadership, trust, commitment, shared understanding, and values) to explain ‘how to’ put collaborative governance into practice as to generate sustainable outcomes. Implementing collaborative governance is turning good intentions and the formal respect of protocols into real collaboration.

Even well-designed collaborative programmes can result in failure. This is often due to the diversity of involved stakeholders and to lack of suitable models or methods to support leadership as to enhance a strategic learning process among involved actors, to manage conflicts, to build trust, to pursue a common shared view, and to identify and evaluate outcomes. Consequently, different steering and management strategies are required (Klijn 2008). A focus on implementation implies attention on how to generate viable and sustainable outcomes from the design, implementation, management, and leadership of a governance network.

Research has emphasized how in today’s complex, plural, and fragmented governance settings) a single organization is able to manage only a subset of the strategic resources affecting the wider system outcomes (Osborne 2010). In this context, innovative performance governance (Bouckaert and Halligan 2008) methods can become a key to foster the implementation of a ‘whole of government’ approach (Christensen and Lægreid 2007), and to support an inter-institutional perspective where policy coordination and collaborative governance foster better community outcomes (Xavier and Bianchi 2020).

Overview of contributions

We begin our symposium with an article on the downstream problems of collaborative governance, which sets the stage for the remaining contributions. The authors (Sørensen and Torfing 2021) start by contrasting two competing definitions of collaborative governance, with the first addressing the concept as an agency-driven process of collaborative interaction between public and private actors and the second discarding the reference to public conveners and focusing on a group of stakeholders engaged in cross-boundary collaboration. This would suggest that not all collaborative initiatives begin with a shared definition of arrangement, which would ultimately impact implementation and outcome. The authors then present the downstream problems in the categories of implementation, evaluation, and accountability, suggesting that they have received far less attention as compared to their upstream counterparts. The authors conclude with future research opportunities within these downstream problems with the goal of ‘what it takes for collaborative governance to go all the way and produce effective high-quality solutions.’

Without question, collaborative governance implementation requires leadership across an inter-organizational and multi-actor environment. Recent studies suggest the adoption of a public service ecosystem approach to incorporate all the individuals, technologies and institutions involved in the service delivery process (Petrescu 2019). This would suggest, from a traditional viewpoint, some form of hierarchy where the leader creates vision, provides motivation, and reports on success. The authors of the next article (Kinder et al. 2021) address the efficacy of a different type of leadership for collaborative governance ecosystems. After presenting the traditional approaches to leadership from their comprehensive literature review, the authors build the case for leadership guided by a collective consciousness that results from learning in logic-of-practice distributed in self-organizing agents of complex adaptive systems like collaborative governance. The authors then present the various aspects of this type of leadership, including consciousness, social learning, and tacking stock, before illustrating how this approach played out in two local public service ecosystems. The authors conclude that there are challenges with this approach, which opens the door for new research approaches on the central role of collaborative leadership.

One approach to successful collaborative governance implementation is the reduction of transaction costs, which can be found in group size, existing network, and hierarchical arrangement, for example, as discussed within the next article on an inter-agency collaborative governance initiative in New Zealand. To overcome some of these natural barriers to collaborative governance implementation, the author (Scott and Merton 2021) addresses the role of goal commitment and how it can be successful when we understand the social and psychological dynamics of collaborative governance. The value of this research, however, is found within both the theory and practice of collaborative governance implementation. In addition to addressing goal commitment from a theoretical perspective, the author presents a case study from a practical perspective to demonstrate how public managers used the concept to design a more robust inter-agency collaborative governance network for obtaining outcomes.

The next article focuses on identifying the conditions necessary for governments to collaborate, expanding on the critical role of the public sector within collaborative governance implementation. In addressing the collaborative practice among local governments in China to control air pollution, the authors (Liu et al. 2021) present qualitative comparative analysis to identify the key variables at play. The authors found three approaches to collaborative governance that impact success, including collaboration around a core city that plays a minimal role as collaborative manager, collaboration around a core city that plays the primary role as collaborative manager, and collaboration of a cooperative and exchange network without the presence of a core city. The authors found that non-participation of higher levels of government and strong competition modes inhibit collaboration. The value of this research demonstrates that a one size fits all approach is not realistic when considering different authoritarian systems, with the authors concluding that local leadership becomes paramount in collaborative governance implementation among local governments.

One aspect of collaborative governance implementation that needs more attention is sustainability. The authors (Molenveld et al. 2021) of the next article address this issue based on the analysis of fourteen urban gardens in the Netherlands, responding to the critical dimension of sustaining collaborative governance, which can be more challenging than implementing the network to resolve identified problems. The author found that financial independence, strong institutionalization, and small core groups of volunteers were the most important configuration to the sustainability of urban gardens. Group size is particularly important given the tie to reducing transition costs from the initiative in New Zealand. The authors conclude: ‘our main contribution to the literature is how our qualitative comparative analysis shows that multiple configurations of factors may explain the durability of effectively governance urban gardens.’ The authors also remark that more research will be needed to allow them to generalize their findings beyond their sample of urban gardens.

The final contribution to our symposiums comes from research by two authors (Douglas and Schiffelers 2021) on identifying the patterns that shape collaborative performance summits, which represents the phenomenon on stakeholders coming together to review their actions and results from collaborative initiatives. The inputs of these collaborative performance summits represent performance information, process design, and personal relationships for example, while the outcomes represent no change, operational change, strategic change, and constitutional change. To avoid pointless talking shops, the authors found success factors around deepening discussion of explicit goals, mining rather than hoarding information, moving slowly to outcomes, and exploring action through steady and significant change. This shift in focus builds on the notion of leadership as a collective consciousness as illustrated in the two local public service ecosystems from Finland. The authors conclude their research with several productive future research streams, which have the potential to add tremendous value to the ‘governance’ of collaborative governance networks and initiatives.

Conclusion

This symposium makes a contribution to the research progress for better framing a complex and multidisciplinary topic such as collaborative governance, with a specific focus on implementation. Still today blurred issues on the topic remain open. Among them: (1) re-designing the boundaries of the State in consideration of their opacity in ‘governance without government’ context; (2) managing the need to exchange and share resources among stakeholders to enhance collaboration towards the achievement of common goals; (3) managing ‘game-like’ interactions among stakeholders, with the intent to foster trust, and (4) steering collaborative governance initiatives through meta-governance (Rhodes 1996, 660).

As noted by Klijn (2002, 151), ‘the hollowing out of the state, both in terms of the autonomous actors who have taken over policy implementation and service delivery and in terms of changing patterns of decision making, raises the question of governance: how can we organize policy implementation and service delivery?’ To address this question, we envisage several challenges for future research. A first challenge is strengthening knowledge from comparative research: learning from cases of success and failure of collaborative governance initiatives in different contexts will improve our understanding of the physiologies and pathologies in such domain. To this end, an important role would also be played by understanding the role played by culture, history, and traditions in the design and implementation of collaborative governance initiatives.

A second challenge is outlining and adopting proper methods to support leaders and other stakeholders in the design and implementation of ‘robust’ strategic plans leading to sustainable community outcomes. In this regard, we envisage different broad fields for research and practice, which include: (1) enhancing a fruitful dialogue and policy alignment between the involved organizations; (2) reducing ambiguity, managing conflict, fostering trust, and legitimacy; (3) building up and deploying shared strategic resources such as incentive systems, data, distribution of power, and knowledge to affect intermediate outcomes, that might sustain the generation of community value; (4) framing trade-offs over time and space; (5) modelling cause-and-effect relationships in performance governance; (6) dealing with intangibles and non-monetary performance measures; (7) turning collaborative governance evaluation from a discrete event to a continuous process, so to foster a learning-oriented approach in performance governance; (8) strengthening an outcome-based approach, to enhance learning forums (Rajala, Laihonen, and Vakkuri 2019) in collaborative performance management (Choi and Moynihan 2019), (9) experimenting how performance governance can enhance ‘Process’ and ‘Outcomes & Accountabilities,’ as two crucial fields for implementing cross sector collaborations (Bryson, Crosby, and Stone 2006).

We also envisage that a third challenge for future research is on profiling governance modes for better improving our understanding on how they affect and are affected by the implementation process, and the intermediate and final outcomes. In this regard, for instance, Provan & Kenis (2008) profiled three different governance modes, i.e.: (1) Participant-Governed Network, implying decision-making through regular meetings of members or through informal and frequent interactions; (2) Lead Organization–Governed Network, where a main entity provides major decision-making and coordinating activities; and (3) Network Administrative Organization, where a separate organization is started to oversee network affairs. Related to the third governance mode, we suggest a need to better profile the role that ‘community-based organizations’,³ may play in the design and implementation of collaborative strategies (Skelcher 2007).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Carmine Bianchi

Carmine Bianchi is a professor of public management at the University of Palermo, specializing in the design of outcome-based, dynamic performance management & governance systems. He has authored numerous books and has published in numerous academic journals.

Greta Nasi

Greta Nasi is an associate professor at Bocconi University, specializing in collaborative public management, city management and competitiveness, and innovation. She has authored numerous books and has published in numerous academic journals.

William C. Rivenbark

William C. Rivenbark is a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, specializing in performance and financial management. He has co-authored two books and has published in numerous academic journals.

Notes

1. e.g., social cohesion, societal ageing, climate change, unemployment, crime, homelessness, healthcare, poverty, pollution, education, and immigration.

2. Similar concepts are implicit in the terms ‘governance networks’ and ‘intergovernmental networks’ (Rhodes 1985). The former ones are associated with ‘public policy making and implementation between a web of relationships between government, business and civil society actors’ (Klijn 2008, 511). The latter have been defined as linkages ‘based on the representative organizations of local authorities’ (Klijn 2003, 79), characterized by a limited vertical interdependence (no service delivery responsibility) and an extensive horizontal articulation (wide range of contacts with other networks).

3. Such organizations are usually non-profit institutions that a group of local stakeholders may set-up, often to address neighbourhood problems, characterized by social marginalization, low-income, poor education, and weak infrastructures. The initiatives that such organizations carry out may cover a broad scope of fields, encompassing affordable housing, sanitation, education, child protection, community building, etc.