Collaborative Governance Regimes

Kirk Emerson, Tina Nabatchi

• Publisher: Georgetown University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781626162549
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Public Affairs & Administration
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Whether the goal is building a local park or developing disaster response models, collaborative governance is changing the way public agencies at the local, regional, and national levels are working with each other and with key partners in the nonprofit and private sectors. While the academic literature has spawned numerous case studies and context- or policy-specific models for collaboration, the growth of these innovative collaborative governance systems has outpaced the scholarship needed to define it.

Collaborative Governance Regimes breaks new conceptual and practical ground by presenting an integrative framework for working across boundaries to solve shared problems, a typology for understanding variations among collaborative governance regimes, and an approach for assessing both process and productivity performance. This book draws on diverse literatures and uses rich case illustrations to inform scholars and practitioners about collaborative governance regimes and to provide guidance for designing, managing, and studying such endeavors in the future.

Collaborative Governance Regimes will be of special interest to scholars and researchers in public administration, public policy, and political science who want a framework for theory building, yet the book is also accessible enough for students and practitioners.

Part I
An Overview of Collaborative Governance

Introduction

Stepping In: The Context for Collaborative Governance

Gettin’ good players is easy. Gettin’ ’em to play together is the hard part.
—Casey Stengel, “The Old Perfessor”

People have been working together to address shared problems since the beginning of civilization, and, over time, they have devised many ingenious ways of organizing to accomplish collective endeavors. One of the most successful organizational approaches has been the creation of the state as separate from society, and, with that, the development of bureaucracy and hierarchy (Fukuyama 2011; Raadschelders, Vigoda-Gadot, and Kisner 2015). The nature of that separation has ebbed and flowed over centuries of experimentation. By the mid–twentieth century, the structural divide between the public and private sectors in the United States was probably at its peak, as the New Deal and federal initiatives in the aftermath of World War II expanded and solidified governmental functions (Fukuyama 2014).

By the turn of the twenty-first century, however, the public/private divide had softened, if not crumbled, as the state hollowed out, the private contracting of public work expanded, and myriad nongovernmental organizations emerged to fill the gaps (Goldsmith and Eggers 2004; Kettl 2002; Light 2002). By necessity, people in various organizations started working directly together across institutional and sectoral boundaries. Today, distinctions between the public, private, and nonprofit sectors are far less clear or rigid, and the hierarchies within the sectors are far more permeable (Kettl 2006). Although structural, political, and cultural impediments to crossing these divides still endure, an increasing demand for cross-boundary collaboration continues to fuel the growth and experimentation with collaborative governance arrangements.

Along with this experimentation has come an explosion of research- and practice-based interest. Scholars and students are seeking to understand these new collaborative arrangements, while practitioners are seeking to improve their collaborative efforts. Elected and professional government officials are searching for more effective and efficient ways of collaborating to get public work done, while civic reformers and activists are looking to increase responsiveness and equity through collaborative governance. Yet despite this broad and growing interest, and the consequent wealth of academic- and practitioner-oriented research, many questions remain. How do collaborative efforts actually work? What do they have in common, and how are they different? Are they successful? How can they be improved? These were among the many questions that prompted us to begin research on collaborative governance in 2009. We continue to explore these questions in this book.

Our research led us not to an overarching theory of collaborative governance but rather to a framework that integrates the different pieces of the collaborative governance puzzle into a dynamic system—what we call a “collaborative governance regime” (CGR). We first presented our integrative framework for collaborative governance in a 2012 article in the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory (Emerson, Nabatchi, and Balogh 2012). Since then, we have received feedback from practitioners and academics at conferences and workshops around the world. On the basis of their comments, innumerable conversations with colleagues, and our continuing research, we have refined our framework and deepened our understanding of CGRs. This book is the result of these efforts.

When we started writing this book, we knew that in addition to our own experiences with and research on collaborative governance, we also wanted to include others’ perspectives on and applications of the integrative framework for collaborative governance. To facilitate this, we issued a call for case studies and illustrations that use our integrative framework as an analytic device. From nearly a dozen proposals, we selected four cases written by contributors, and we added two of our own. In selecting these cases, we wanted a diverse range of examples that included what we (and others) had observed were important distinguishing characteristics of collaborative governance arrangements—the scale of the issue and locus of participants (i.e., local, regional, national), the size of the collaborating body (i.e., the number of participants engaged), and the specific policy arena (e.g., place-based or policy-oriented). For broader appeal, we were also interested in a geographic range of cases. That the cases turned out to be located in the United States, Mexico, and Canada was frankly serendipitous. As a result, the shorter case illustrations and more in-depth case studies throughout this book provide excellent examples of the breadth and complexity of CGRs across America. Consider the following brief case overviews:

• In light of ongoing concerns about higher education in the United States, but despite heavy competition for a finite supply of students, several state governments opted to work with public and private colleges and universities and with national educational groups to set priorities for improving higher education policies.

• After years of conflict and concern over the degradation of the Everglades, the US Congress mandated that federal, state, local, and tribal governments work together to restore this culturally and environmentally significant ecosystem in South Florida.

• As Tucson grappled with concerns about potentially hazardous levels of noise from military jets during training sorties from a nearby air force base, an independent convener was employed to help the community and the base move from contentious debate to collaborative negotiations and decisions.

• After decades of struggling with complex governance challenges and policy gaps in the greater Toronto metropolitan region, a wide array of political, administrative, and civic leaders coalesced to better address political, social, environmental, and other social needs.

• When a remote Alaska Native village began collapsing into the Bering Sea as eroding coastal storms and melting permafrost made it uninhabitable, federal, state, and tribal governments began working together to relocate the community—despite the fact that no single government or agency had the specific responsibility or resources to solve the problem.

• When Mexico reorganized its national water law in 1992 and decentralized local groundwater management, community actors were given the opportunity to collaborate and change long-standing economic and cultural power imbalances.

Before we can examine the integrative framework and cases, however, we must first set the stage for this book. With this introductory chapter, we invite readers to step in and explore the context of collaborative governance. We begin by briefly discussing the growing demand for collaborative governance, focusing particularly on “wicked” problems (defined below) and the changing nature of governance, and exploring how those trends have contributed to experimentation with collaborative governance arrangements. Next, we explain the purposes behind this book and the specific contributions we seek to make to the field of collaborative governance. We conclude with a brief review of the book’s content and organization.

The Demand for Collaborative Governance

The rise of collaborative governance can be attributed to many factors, but two long-standing trends are particularly salient. First, “wicked problems”—a term coined by Rittel and Weber (1973) that refers to problems that are difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete or contradictory information, rapidly shifting environments, and complex interdependencies—are increasing (Head 2008). Examples of wicked problems abound, ranging from domestic issues—such as the impoverishment of education, health care, and justice systems; the crumbling of transportation, utility, energy, and other infrastructure systems; and recurring crises in housing, financial, and industrial markets—to international and global issues, such as climate change, food and water shortages, infectious disease, human trafficking, and the illegal arms trade.

Second, just as the number and complexity of public problems are growing, so, too, is the context in which these problems must be solved becoming more complex: “Sustainable resources for public agencies and programs are diminishing on a daily basis. . . . Public coffers are strained, and in some cases, completely drained; . . . public sector labor markets are largely broken and in distress; and . . . fungible supplies of political support for policies and programs are declining at break-neck pace across all levels of government and throughout the world” (Nabatchi, Goerdel, and Peffer 2011, i29). In the following discussion, we briefly unpack these two trends, explaining how the rise of wicked problems and the changing context of governance are contributing to the demand for cross-boundary collaboration.

The Rise of Wicked Problems

There are tame problems, and there are wicked problems. Tame problems are well defined and easily addressed. For example, nearly 58 million Americans are eligible to receive Social Security benefits from the federal government; the Social Security Administration issues and mails monthly checks to recipients across the nation. During the winter, ice forms and expands beneath the surface of the state roads, creating frost heaves; in the spring, state and local departments of transportation send crews and equipment to make the needed repairs. Storms sometimes cause flooding, leading to sewerage overages that affect municipal water quality; the local utility provider regularly tests water safety and informs the public about problems. These tame problems are well defined and have obvious solutions that can be objectively evaluated. Of course, implementation of their solutions—issuing checks, scheduling road maintenance, or reporting test results—is sometimes complicated; but, in general, the responsible organization uses its expertise and management systems to address tame problems with relative ease.

Increasingly, however, twenty-first-century problems are wicked—they are not tame, and their solutions are not simple. Income inequality—measured as the share of total income going to different sections of the population—is now at or near the highest levels on record in the United States, threatening economic growth, people’s quality of life, and the stability of political and financial systems. Climate change is warming the atmosphere and oceans, resulting in (among other issues) rising sea levels that threaten island nations and coastal communities, extreme and prolonged weather events that harm and displace large, vulnerable populations around the world, and shifting patterns of agricultural production that cause food and water shortages. Human trafficking is exploding; every year, between 600,000 and 800,000 people—the majority of whom are women and children—are trafficked across international borders in a global industry that annually generates about $32 billion in profits.

These wicked problems are dynamic and complex, with no clear definition and no obvious solution. They involve multiple stakeholders in multiple organizations across multiple jurisdictions who may see and understand the problem and solution differently. Because wicked problems ignore the boundaries that shape our public sphere, the responses to these problems must transcend these boundaries, including governmental, sectoral, jurisdictional, geographic, and even conceptual demarcations. In short, the fact that wicked problems cannot be addressed by a single organization acting alone is encouraging collaborative governance.

The Changing Context of Governance

More than forty years ago, Harlan Cleveland (1972, 13) observed that people want “less government and more governance.” His vision of government was one where the “organizations that get things done” serve as “systems . . . in which control is loose, power diffused, and centers of decision plural”; where “decision making” is an “intricate process of multilateral brokerage both inside and outside the [responsible] organization”; where organizations are “horizontal” and “more collegial, consensual, and consultative”; and where “the bigger the problems to be tackled, the more real power is diffused and the larger the number of persons who can exercise it—if they work at it.” Some aspects of Cleveland’s vision have not materialized; many organizations remain hierarchical, with few vestiges of collegial, consensual, and consultative behavior. However, other aspects of his vision have emerged; we now live in a networked world filled with multilateral decision making and big problems that involve many people and diffuse sources of power. In any case, the context of governance has changed considerably since Cleveland’s observation, and it continues to evolve.

Government used to do the public’s work directly. This is no longer always true. Devolution, decentralization, and other related forces have shifted the provision of public goods and services from the federal government to state and local governments. In turn, the rise of market-based tools—such as contracting, commercialization, partnerships, grants, outsourcing, concession arrangements, and privatization—has enabled government to further extend previously public responsibilities beyond its boundaries to the private and nonprofit sectors (Kettl 2006). Together, these forces have given rise to the “hollow state”—a metaphor for the shrinking of government and loss of direct public services (Milward and Provan 2000)—and also to the “fragmented and disarticulated state” (Frederickson 1999, 702)—where “jurisdictions of all types—nation-states, states, provinces, cities, counties, and special districts—are losing their borders.” As a result of these changes, public goods and services are now being provided by elaborate networks of indirect administrative approaches conducted by myriad organizations in the public, private, and nonprofit sectors (Goldsmith and Eggers 2004; Kettl 2006; Light 2002; Salamon 2002). The work needed to organize, direct, and manage these networks greatly enhances the opportunities and incentives for collaborative governance.

This shift to complex, networked arrangements is not the only change in the governance context. We also are seeing extraordinary, and regularly occurring, fiscal upheavals and policy crises. Government is plagued by gridlock, highly polarized policy debates, and an inability to agree on seemingly commonsense measures. The result has been not only a decline in political and budgetary support for policies and programs but also a reduction in problem-solving capacities. In turn, this has helped produce the highest levels of citizen distrust and frustration—indeed, disgust—with government that we have ever seen (Steinhauser 2014). However, citizens are now equipped with technological tools that enable them to connect with each other—and with government agencies, private institutions, and civil society organizations—in ways unimagined just a few decades ago. They are increasingly using these tools to demand government responsiveness and effective solutions (Nabatchi and Leighninger 2015).

In sum, we now live in a world that is increasingly beset by wicked problems that must be addressed in a continually evolving, complex governance context. Governments at all levels in the United States, and in nations around the world, have been trying to adapt to these new conditions. “Collaborative governance,” an umbrella term for myriad cross-boundary, multi-institutional arrangements, is not only a significant adaptive response to these conditions but is also spurring tremendous innovation.

Experiments with Collaborative Governance Arrangements

There is considerable diversity in the forms, functions, and scales of collaborative governance arrangements. Several decades of experimentation and innovation have led to numerous variations—ranging from intergovernmental and interstate arrangements, interagency work, and “joined up” government to public service contracting, public–private partnerships, co-management and adaptive management systems, and local multistakeholder collaboratives. During the last few decades, emerging systems of collaborative governance have attracted the attention of scholars and practitioners around the world working in multiple disciplines, including public administration, public policy, political science, conflict resolution, planning, and environmental studies (An-sell and Gash 2008; Bingham and O’Leary 2008).

Scholars are working to catch up with the advances in the practice of collaborative governance, and new knowledge is being produced rapidly—ranging from case studies of particular instances or forms of collaborative governance to research on the structures for and processes of collaboration to empirical analyses of leadership skills for collaboration. Some scholars connect these new arrangements to the historic study of intergovernmental cooperation in the 1960s (e.g., Agranoff and McGuire 2003; Wright 1988; Elazar 1962, 1984), whereas others trace their roots back to the birth of American federalism itself—“the most enduring model of collaborative problem resolution” (McGuire 2006, 34). Some examine collaborative governance through theoretical lenses, such as group theory (Bentley 1949), collective action (Olsen 1965), and institutional analysis (Ostrom 1990). Other scholars connect it to broader concepts of public administration and democracy (e.g., Frederickson 1991; Jun 2002; Kettl 2002) or to citizen participation (e.g., Fung and Wright 2001; Nabatchi 2010; Sirianni 2009; Torres 2003), whereas still others focus more specifically on public management (e.g., Agranoff and McGuire 2001a; Kettl 2006; McGuire 2006).

This diversity of research approaches is mirrored in the work of practitioners who have advanced best practices. Some of this work focuses on collaborative governance writ large (e.g., Bardach 1998; Carlson 2007; Donahue and Zechauser 2011; Emerson and Smutko 2011; Henton et al. 2005), but often it is situated within the context of alternative dispute resolution, which is not surprising, given collaboration’s historic roots in that field (Koontz and Thomas 2006). For example, some practitioners have focused on methods for convening groups and ensuring diverse participation (e.g., Margerum 2011). Others have looked at how to foster principled engagement, for example, through ground rules (e.g., Schwarz 1995), consensus building (e.g., Carlson and Arthur 1999), and interest-based negotiation (e.g., O’Leary and Bingham 2007). Our search for the commonalities across these variations in applications and disciplines led us to develop our integrative framework for collaborative governance (Emerson, Nabatchi, and Balogh 2012), which we further explore and advance in this book.

The Purposes of This Book

In this book, we seek to improve the study and practice of collaborative governance. We do so by focusing on four major goals. First, we try to make sense of the numerous terms and concep...