JPART18:543–571 Collaborative Governance in Theory
and Practice
Chris Anll
Alison Gash
University of California,Berkeley
ABSTRACT
Over the past few decades,a new form of governance has emerged to replace adversarial and managerial modes of policy making and implementation.Collaborative governance,as it has come to be known,brings public and private stakeholders together in collective forums with public agencies to engage in connsus-oriented decision making.In this article, we conduct a meta-analytical study of the existing literature on collaborative governance with the goal of elaborating a contingency model of collaborative governance.After review-ing137cas of collaborative governance across a range of policy ctors,we identify critical variables that will influence whether or not this mode of governance will produce successful collaboration.The variables include the prior history of conflict or cooperation,
the incentives for stakeholders to participate,power and resources imbalances,leadership, and institutional design.We also identify a ries of factors that are crucial within the collaborative process itlf.The factors include face-to-face dialogue,trust building,and the development of commitment and shared understanding.We found that a virtuous cycle of collaboration tends to develop when collaborative forums focus on‘‘small wins’’that deepen trust,commitment,and shared understanding.The article concludes with a discus-sion of the implications of our contingency model for practitioners and for future rearch on collaborative governance.
Over the last two decades,a new strategy of governing called‘‘collaborative governance’’has developed.This mode of governance brings multiple stakeholders together in common forums with public agencies to engage in connsus-oriented decision making.In this article,we conduct a meta-analytical study of the existing literature on collaborative governance with the goal of elaborating a general model of collaborative governance. The ultimate goal is to develop a contingency approach to collaboration that can highlight conditions under which collaborative governance will be more or less effective as an Early versions of this article were prented at the Conference on Democratic Network Governance,Copenhagen,the Interdisciplinary Committee on Organizations at the University of California,Irvine,and the Berkeley graduate minar Perspectives on Governance.We t
hank the participants of the events for their uful suggestions and Martha Feldman,in particular,for her encouragement.We also thank two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful and uful comments.Address correspondence to the author at canll@berkeley.edu or aligash@berkeley.edu.
doi:10.1093/jopart/mum032
Advance Access publication on November13,2007
ªThe Author2007.Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Journal of Public Administration Rearch
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approach to policy making and public management.1In conducting this meta-analytic study,we adopted a strategy we call ‘‘successive approximation’’:we ud a sample of the literature to develop a common language for analyzing collaborative governance and then successively ‘‘tested’’this language against additional cas,refining and elaborating our model of collaborative governance as we evaluated additional cas.
Although collaborative governance may now have a fashionable management cache
´,the untidy character of the literature on collaboration reflects the way it has bubbled up from many local experiments,often in reaction to previous governance failures.Collabo-rative governance has emerged as a respon to the failures of downstream implementation and to the high cost and politicization of regulation.It has developed as an alternative to the adversarialism of interest group pluralism and to the accountability failures of manageri-alism (especially as the authority of experts is challenged).More positively,one might argue that trends toward collaboration also ari from the growth of knowledge and in-stitutional capacity.As knowledge becomes increasingly specialized and distributed and as institutional infrastructures become more complex and interdependent,the demand for collaboration increas.The common metric for all the factors may be,as Gray (1989)has pointed out,the increasing ‘‘turbulence’’faced by policy makers and managers.
Although Susskind and Cruikshank (1987),Gray (1989),and Fung and Wright (2001,2003)have suggested more general theoretical accounts of collaborative governance,much of the literature is focud on the species rather than the genus .The bulk of the collaborative governance literature is compod of single-ca ca studies focud on ctor-specific governance issues like site-bad management of schools,community po-licing,watershed councils,regulatory negotiation,collaborative
什么胜什么无planning,community health partnerships,and natural resource comanagement (the species).2Moreover,a num-ber of the most influential theoretical accounts of this phenomenon are focud on specific types of collaborative governance.Healey (1996,2003)and Innes and Booher (1999a,1999b),for example,provide foundational accounts of collaborative planning,as Freeman (1997)does for regulation and administrative law and Wondolleck and Yaffee (2000)do for natural resources management.Our goal is to build on the findings of this rich literature,but also to derive theoretical and empirical claims about the genus of collaborative governance—about the common mode of governing.
DEFINING COLLABORATIVE GOVERNANCE
We define collaborative governance as follows:
A governing arrangement where one or more public agencies directly engage non-state stakeholders in a collective decision-making process that is formal,connsus-oriented,and deliberative and that aims to make or implement public policy or manage public
programs or asts.
This definition stress six important criteria:(1)the forum is initiated by public agencies or institutions,(2)participants in the forum include nonstate actors,(3)participants engage directly in decision making and are not merely ‘‘consulted’’by public agencies,(4)the 1Thomas (1995)develops a contingency perspective on public participation,though it aims more broadly and is developed from the perspective of public managers.
2A smaller group of studies evaluates specific types of collaborative governance at a more aggregated level (for example,e Beierle [2000],Langbein [2002],and Leach,Pelkey,and Sabatier [2002]).
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Anll and Gash Collaborative Governance in Theory and Practice545 forum is formally organized and meets collectively,(5)the forum aims to make decisions
辞严意正by connsus(even if connsus is not achieved in practice),and(6)the focus of collab-oration is on public policy or public management.This is a more restrictive definition than
is sometimes found in the literature.However,the wide-ranging u of the term has,as Imperial notes,been a barrier to theory building(Imperial2005,286).Since our goal is to compare apples with apples(to the extent possible),we have defined the term restrictively
so as to increa the comparability of our cas.
One critical component of the term collaborative governance is‘‘governance.’’Much rearch has been devoted to establishing a workable definition of governance that is bounded and falsifiable,yet comprehensive.For instance,Lynn,Heinrich,and Hill (2001,7)construe governance broadly as‘‘regimes of laws,rules,judicial decisions,
and administrative practices that constrain,prescribe,and enable the provision of publicly supported goods and rvices.’’This definition provides room for traditional governmental structures as well as emerging forms of public/private decision-making bodies.Stoker,on
the other hand,argues:
As a baline definition it can be taken that governance refers to the rules and forms that guide
collective decision-making.That the focus is on decision-making in the collective implies
爱的背后that governance is not about one individual making a decision but rather about groups of
individuals or organisations or systems of organisations making decisions(2004,3).
He also suggests that among the various interpretations of the term,there is‘‘baline agreement that governance refers to the development of governing styles in which bound-
aries between and within public and private ctors have become blurred’’(Stoker1998, 17).We opt for a combined approach to conceptualize governance.We agree with Lynn, Heinrich,and Hill that governance applies to laws and rules that pertain to the provision of
经销商授权书public goods.However,we adopt Stoker’s claim that governance is also about collective decision making—and specifically about collective decision making that includes both
public and private actors.Collaborative governance is therefore a type of governance in
which public and private actors work collectively in distinctive ways,using particular process,to establish laws and rules for the provision of public goods.
Although there are many forms of collaboration involving strictly nonstate actors,our
definition stipulates a specific role for public agencies.By using the term‘‘public agency,’’
our intention is to include public institutions such as bureaucracies,courts,legislatures,and
other governmental bodies at the local,state,or federal level.But the typical public in-stitution among our cas is,in fact,an executive branch agency,and therefore,the term
‘‘public agency’’is apt.Such public agencies may initiate collaborative forums either to
蒜蓉大虾怎么做好吃fulfill their own purpos or to comply with a mandate,including court orders,legislation,
or rules governing the allocation of federal funds.For example,the Workforce Investment
Act of1998stipulates that all states and localities receiving federal workforce develop-
ment funds must convene a workforce investment board that comprid public and private
actors in order to develop and overe policies at the state and local level concerning job training,under-and unemployment.According to our definition,the workforce invest-
ments boards are mandated to engage in collaborative governance.
Although public agencies are typically the initiators or instigators of collaborative governance,our definition requires participation by nonstate stakeholders.Some scholars describe interagency coordination as collaborative governance.Although there is nothing inherently wrong with using the term in this way,much of the literature on collaborative
governance us this term to signal a different kind of relationship between public agencies and nonstate stakeholders.Smith (1998,61),for example,argues that collaboratives in-volve ‘‘reprentation by key interest groups.’’Connick and Innes (2003,180)define collaborative governance as including ‘‘reprentatives of all relevant interests.’’Reilly (1998,115)describes collaborative efforts as a type of problem solving that involves the ‘‘shared pursuit of government agencies and concerned citizens.’’
We u the term ‘‘stakeholder’’to refer both to the participation of citizens as indi-viduals and to the participation of organized groups.For convenience,we will also here-after u the term ‘‘stakeholder’’to refer to both public agencies and nonstate stakeholders,though we believe that public agencies have a distinctive leadership role in collaborative governance.Our definition of collaborative governance also ts standards for the type of participation of nonstate stakeholders.We believe that collaborative governance is never merely consultative.3Collaboration i
mplies two-way communication and influence be-tween agencies and stakeholders and also opportunities for stakeholders to talk with each other.Agencies and stakeholders must meet together in a deliberative and multilateral process.In other words,as described above,the process must be collective .Consultative techniques,such as stakeholder surveys or focus groups,although possibly very uful management tools,are not collaborative in the n implied here becau they do not permit two-way flows of communication or multilateral deliberation.
Collaboration also implies that nonstate stakeholders will have real responsibility for policy outcomes.Therefore,we impo the condition that stakeholders must be directly engaged in decision making.This criterion is implicit in much of the collaborative gov-ernance literature.Freeman (1997,22),for example,argues that stakeholders participate ‘‘in all stages of the decisionmaking process.’’The watershed partnerships studied by Leach,Pelkey,and Sabatier (2002,648)make policy and implementation decisions on a range of ongoing water management issues regarding streams,rivers,and watersheds.Ultimate authority may lie with the public agency (as with regulatory negotiation),but stakeholders must directly participate in the decision-making process.Thus,advisory committees may be a form of collaborative governance if their advice is cloly linked to decision-making outcomes.In practice (and by design),however,advisory committees are often far removed from actual decision making.
We impo the criteria of formal collaboration to distinguish collaborative gover-nance from more casual and conventional forms of agency-interest group interaction.For example,the term collaborative governance might be thought to describe the informal relationships that agencies and interest groups have always cultivated.Surely,interest groups and public agencies have always engaged in two-way flows of influence.The difference between our definition of collaborative governance and conventional interest group influence is that the former implies an explicit and public strategy of organizing this influence.Walter and Petr (2000,495),for example,describe collaborative governance as a formal activity that ‘‘involves joint activities,joint structures and shared resources,’’and Padilla and Daigle (1998,74)prescribe the development of a ‘‘structured arrangement.’’This formal arrangement implies organization and structure.
Decisions in collaborative forums are connsus oriented (Connick and Innes 2003;Seidenfeld 2000).Although public agencies may have the ultimate authority to make 3See Beierle and Long (1999)for an example of collaboration as consultation.
关于猫的谜语Journal of Public Administration Rearch and Theory
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Anll and Gash Collaborative Governance in Theory and Practice547 a decision,the goal of collaboration is typically to achieve some degree of connsus among stakeholders.We u the term connsus oriented becau collaborative forums
often do not succeed in reaching connsus.However,the premi of meeting together in
a deliberative,multilateral,and formal forum is to strive toward connsus or,at least,to
strive to discover areas of agreement.
Finally,collaborative governance focus on public policies and issues.The focus
on public issues distinguishes collaborative governance from other forms of connsus decision making,such as alternative dispute resolution or transformative mediation. Although agencies may pursue dispute resolution or mediation to reduce social or political
conflict,the techniques are often ud to deal with strictly private conflicts.Moreover,
public dispute resolution or mediation may be designed merely to resolve private disputes.
While acknowledging the ambiguity of the boundary between public and private,we restrict the u of the term‘‘collaborative governance’’to the governance of public affairs.
Our definition of collaborative governance is meant to distinguish collaborative gov-ernance from two alternative patterns of policy making:adversarialism and managerialism (Bunberg1999;Futrell2003;Williams and Matheny1995).By contrast with decisions
made adversarially,collaborative governance is not a‘‘winner-take-all’’form of interest intermediation.In collaborative governance,stakeholders will often have an adversarial relationship to one another,but the goal is to transform adversarial relationships into more cooperative ones.In adversarial politics,groups may engage in positive-sum bargaining
and develop cooperative alliances.However,this cooperation is ad hoc,and adversarial politics does not explicitly ek to transform conflict into cooperation.
In managerialism,public agencies make decisions unilaterally or through clod de-
cision process,typically relying on agency experts to make decisions(Futrell2003; Williams and Matheny1995).Although managerial agencies may take account of stake-
国内dnsholder perspectives in their decision making and may even go so far as to consult directly
with stakeholders,collaborative governance requires that stakeholders be directly included
in the decision-making process.
A number of synonyms for collaborative governance may cau confusion.For ex-ample,‘‘corporatism’’is certainly a form of collaborative governance as we define it. Classic definitions of corporatism(like Schmitter’s)emphasize tripartite bargaining be-
tween peak associations of labor and capital and the state.Typically,the peak associa-
tions have a reprentational monopoly in their ctor(they are‘‘encompassing’’).If we
start with this narrower definition of corporatism,collaborative governance is the broader term.Collaborative governance often implies the inclusion of a broader range of stake-holders than corporatism,and the stakeholders often lack a reprentational monopoly over
their ctor.The term‘‘associational governance’’is sometimes ud to refer to the more generic mode of governing with associations,but collaborative governance may not even include formal associations.The Porte Alegre project,for example,is a form of collabo-
rative governance that includes individual citizens in budgetary decision making(Fung and Wright2001).
Sometimes the term‘‘policy network’’is ud to describe more pluralistic forms of
state-society cooperation.A policy network may include both public agencies and stake-
holder groups.Moreover,policy networks typically imply cooperative modes of deliber-
ation or decision making among actors within the network.Thus,the terms policy network
and collaborative governance can refer to similar phenomena.However,collaborative governance refers to an explicit and formal strategy of incorporating stakeholders into
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