Collaborative governance in practice: power, networks and inclusion in a biocultural landscape

The renovation of old urban residential areas is and will continue to be an important part of urban renewal in China. The renovation of existing old urban residential areas focuses more on the physical level of renovation and pays insufficient attention to the improvement of collaborative community governance. However, collaborative community governance is the key to sustainable renovation. This study aims to explore the formation mechanism of multiple subjects’ collaborative governance in the renovation of old urban residential areas. A general collaborative governance theoretical framework was adopted and adjusted by innovatively introducing the improvement of collaborative community governance in old urban residential areas as an important variable in collaborative results. Data were collected through 853 questionnaires in 16 provinces across China and analyzed using Structural Equation Modeling. Data analysis reveals the following conclusions: (1) institution design and the collaborative process have significant positive impacts on collaborative results, while facilitative leadership has a negative impact; (2) the collaborative process is an important mediating variable on collaborative results; (3) government departments’ and residents’ self-governing organizations play important roles in improving collaborative community governance. Face-to-face dialogue and consultation, information disclosure and transparency, and reaching an intermediate consensus are important mediator variables. The research results provide theoretical support and practical suggestions for promoting the improvement of multiple-subject collaboration through old urban residential area renovation.

Tourism villages are a potential sector in the development of an area with very minimal risk of environmental damage. This makes village tourism a leading sector for all villages, including villages in Ciamis Regency. The development of tourist villages in the normative and empirical process needs to be carried out through collaborative governance because tourist villages have multidimensional characteristics. The development of tourist villages in Ciamis Regency is still not optimal because even though it has great potential and is supported by the Tourism Information Center, it turns out that the development process is still carried out separately between all parties involved. The aim of this research is to analyze collaborative government governance in developing tourist villages and find an ideal collaborative governance model in developing tourist villages in Ciamis Regency. For this purpose, Ansell and Gash's government collaboration theory is used which includes four dimensions, namely initial conditions, facilitative leadership, institutional design, and collaboration processes. The research uses a qualitative approach with descriptive research type. Data analysis was carried out through data reduction and drawing conclusions. The research results show that the ongoing tourism village development process has not fully adopted collaborative governance. This is because trust has not been formed in each of the actors involved. The ideal tourism village development model that adopts collaborative governance is the Tourism Development Model. This model prioritizes building trust and sustainable commitment to each actor in tourism village development.

The rapid development of digital transformation in the public sector has encouraged local governments in Indonesia to adopt more collaborative, adaptive, and technology-based governance models. Subang Regency, which is undergoing significant regional transformation due to the development of Patimban Seaport and its integration into the Rebana Metropolitan area, faces increasing demands to modernize its public service systems through smart city initiatives. This study examines the role of collaborative governance in advancing the smart city agenda in Subang Regency. Using a qualitative approach with a case study design, data were collected through in-depth interviews, observations, and document analysis involving government agencies, private sector representatives, academics, and community groups. The findings reveal that smart city development in Subang remains at a transitional stage and has not yet achieved the level of cross-sector integration required for effective implementation. Several constraints were identified, including sectoral ego among government agencies, uneven digital capacity of civil servants, limited data interoperability, and insufficient involvement of non-government actors. Analysis using collaborative governance theory indicates that initial conditions, institutional design, facilitative leadership, and collaborative processes have not been optimally developed, resulting in weak shared motivation and limited capacity for joint action. Nevertheless, opportunities exist to strengthen collaborative governance through improved institutional platforms, leadership development, enhanced digital literacy, and strategic partnerships with private and academic stakeholders. This study contributes to the understanding of how collaborative governance shapes digital transformation in local government contexts and offers practical recommendations for strengthening smart city implementation in Subang Regency. By reinforcing collaborative mechanisms, Subang has the potential to accelerate its smart city development and achieve more integrated, inclusive, and sustainable digital governance. Keyword : Collaborative governance, smart city.

Increasing desertification has been threatening the sustainable development of human society. Accordingly, the topic of desertification has garnered increasing attention in ecological development and environmental protection. Since the reform and opening-up (1978), China has been actively engaged in desertification control practices and has achieved remarkable results. However, studies have discussed China’s achievements in desertification control mainly from the perspective of natural science and science and technology. Studies conducting an in-depth analysis from the perspective of public management have been inadequate. This study considers collaborative governance in public management as a crucial theoretical tool to analyze collaborative governance in desertification control. Based on desertification control practices in China, an analysis framework was formed for collaborative desertification governance. The analysis framework encompasses the following four dimensions: (1)value, specifying the means to effectively achieve the value goal of collaboration; (2) institutions, identifying the measures to ensure the long-term operation of collaborative governance; (3) structure, identifying the specific relationship and content of collaboration; and (4) mechanisms, defining the practices for collaborative governance. In addition, the case of the Hobq Desert was considered to analyze the framework through the aforementioned four dimensions.

The development of the Nongsa Special Economic Zone (SEZ) in Batam City is aimed at becoming a strategic hub for digital economy growth and creative industries. However, its implementation faces serious governance challenges, such as overlapping authority between the Batam City Government and the Batam Indonesia Free Zone Authority (BP Batam), inadequate supporting infrastructure, and low stakeholder engagement. This study aims to analyze the collaborative governance model in the management of the Nongsa SEZ using the framework of Ansell and Gash, which consists of four core components: starting conditions, institutional design, facilitative leadership, and the collaborative process. This research employs a qualitative approach with a case study method, utilizing in-depth interviews, document analysis, and participatory observation as data collection techniques. The findings reveal four main issues: power imbalances, exclusivity in institutional design, weak facilitative leadership, and suboptimal collaborative processes. These factors hinder the development of inclusive and sustainable collaboration. This study offers practical contributions by proposing a participatory collaborative forum and academic contributions by enriching the literature on collaborative governance in digital economy-oriented SEZ development in Indonesia. This study concludes that the governance of the Nongsa SEZ has not yet fully met the prerequisites for effective collaboration as defined by Ansell and Gash. Strengthening formal collaborative forums, enhancing the capacity of local actors, and aligning regulations across government levels are necessary to support participatory, integrated, and sustainable SEZ governance.

PurposeThis paper aims to study the results of open innovation initiatives in Spain under the lockdown during the first stages of the COVID-19 crisis. Based on the most recent literature on open innovation in the public sector, this paper explores the following research questions, namely, what are the key features of collaborative governance processes that guided open innovation initiatives in the Spanish public sector during the COVID-19 crises? How open public innovation cases generated public value to the society during the COVID-19 crises in Spain?Design/methodology/approachThe study is based on two in-depth case studies of open innovation in the public sector: the collaborative platform Frena la Curva and the hackathon Vence al Virus, both launched during the first moments of the COVID-19 crisis. The methodology is based on 13 semi-structured interviews, content observation and documentary analysis. The data were interpreted according to the dimensions described in the analytical framework: descriptive dimensions of both initiatives but also their degree of elaboration, incentives and objectives, characteristics of governance and collaboration between actors and challenges for the accountability processes; and finally, their procedural legitimacy, considering the COVID-19 crisis context.FindingsThe results of the study show that citizens have played a key role during the hardest stage of the crisis, collaborating with governments and advancing their innovative capabilities, mostly in the digital sphere. The analysis also identified different outcomes, including the improvement of citizen’s involvement, deliberation practices or network building. Besides, this paper has identified some limitations and barriers to open innovation and collaborative governance processes in terms of accountability and legitimacy of these initiatives. Here, their contribution was constrained by the emerging stage of implementation and by the unique circumstances of the lockdown under the COVID-19 crisis.Research limitations/implicationsFuture advancements of open innovation initiatives to consolidate collaborative governance processes will need further exploration. Although this paper diversified the contacts and the data collection in the fieldwork to avoid social biases, the results of the interviews might reflect very positive outcomes. Despite the case studies that took place during the COVID-19 crisis and their planned actions to maintain their existence, the post-crisis analysis will be needed to assess the impact of these open innovation cases in collaborative governance structures.Practical implicationsOpen innovation is an emerging narrative and practice in the public sector requiring time and energy from public officials and managers. The study also highlighted the problem of how to legitimate open innovation cases in the public sector and the implications for their institutionalization. Public managers involved in these types of initiatives need to keep the momentum both inside and outside their organizations. Regarding the utilization of information and communications technologies (ICTs), open innovation processes do not need technology to develop their full potential, whereas the COVID-19 crisis and the ongoing digitalization of work settings, accessibility, etc., could transform ICTs into a critical tool for public managers leading innovation initiatives within their organizations.Social implicationsThe social implications of this paper are manifold. This study provides evidence of one of the future avenues of public management: open innovation. New avenues for the involvement and collaboration of citizens with public authorities are another social implication pinpointed by this paper. Democratic legitimacy and procedural accountability are assessed using the open innovation case studies during the COVID-19 crisis. Finally, transforming governments using collaborative platforms deserves social oversight understanding if they really contribute to build trust in political institutions.Originality/valueDespite their differences, both Frena la Curva and Vence al Virus demonstrated the potential and limitations of public innovation and collaborative governance to cope with an unprecedented crisis such as the COVID-19. The special features of this emergency, including the long period of confinement, posed challenges and also opportunities to develop these initiatives: as several interviewees stated, these projects helped to channel the civic energy to co-produce solutions in collaboration with a wide range of actors. Data allow us to identify the key features of collaborative governance that guided open innovation initiatives in the Spanish public sector during the COVID-19 crisis.

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 consensus-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 reviewing 137 cases of collaborative governance across a range of policy sectors, we identify critical variables that will influence whether or not this mode of governance will produce successful collaboration. These 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 series of factors that are crucial within the collaborative process itself. These 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 discussion of the implications of our contingency model for practitioners and for future research on collaborative governance.

A report submitted to Victoria’s Minister for Environment, Climate Change & Water in 2015 identified that the mechanisms in place for governance of Melbourne’s Lower Yarra River inhibit the river’s potential to enhance the liveability of the City of Melbourne. An absence of shared strategy and coordinated management across multiple government agencies was highlighted. Recommendations were made for revised governance arrangements, but they have been largely disregarded. Scholarship of the structure and function of river governance networks is at an early stage, but this study applies theory from a related field – collaborative governance – to investigate the implications of this lost opportunity for enhanced collaboration. The study explores the opportunity to apply an integrated framework for collaborative governance developed by Emerson, Nabatchi & Balogh, and its constituent elements, to an urban river governance context. The integrated framework is shown to be a valuable tool for illuminating the drivers, engagement processes, motivational attributes and joint capacities that can enable shared decision-making and implementation across multiple organisations and jurisdictions, to achieve desired ends. The study identifies the need to effectively manage political, legal, socioeconomic and environmental influences (the system context), along with the constraints of collaboration dynamics, if a collaborative governance regime is to be successfully implemented. The study identifies that factors such as interdependence, leadership direction, consequential incentives and uncertainty play a key role in driving collaboration dynamics, in the context of an urban river corridor. A collaborative multi-regulator partnership approach is advocated as the immediate way forward for the Lower Yarra.

The public policy and public management literatures together support a vibrant discussion of collaborative governance. Much of this scholarship takes a broad perspective focusing on questions such as what collaborative governance is; why collaborative governance emerges; or why individuals and organizations choose to participate in voluntary, nonbinding collaborative efforts. This paper focuses specifically on the role of public managers as leaders, encouragers, and followers of collaborative governance. We examine the decision calculus factoring into the choice of collaborative governance as a toolbox for achieving desired policy goals. That is, we ask why public managers choose to devote public resources to collaborative governance. What motivates public managers to pick up the phone, write a check, or otherwise change their current behavior? We develop 20 propositions that contextualize this choice in terms of two overarching questions: (i) How do institutional structure and organizational strategy intersect to influence the ways in which public managers design and implement collaborative governance?; and (ii) Why do public managers choose particular roles within collaborative institutions? In doing so, we demonstrate how the public policy and public management literatures can be coupled to better understand a theoretical issue that each research body struggles to encapsulate in isolation.

This article offers a critical analysis of collaborative water governance initiatives in New Zealand that is embedded in deliberative democratic theory. The article begins with a review of the scientific and political dimensions of the country’s water quality issues. The authors then discuss collaborative governance initiatives in the Canterbury region and freshwater co-management initiatives between the Crown and Maori, the indigenous people of New Zealand. The article relates these two sets of collaborative practices linked to water policies to deliberative democracy and shows how a systemic approach to deliberation and the implementation of mini-publics could mitigate some shortcomings of collaborative water governance initiatives in New Zealand, both the problems of “wallpaper” democracy, in which the public’s engagement is relegated to superficial decisions, and the power imbalance between elites and the general public in collaborative decision-making processes. The model may also apply to other water governance efforts.

Tasikmalaya City Government organized the Acceleration of Settlement Sanitation Development (PPSP) program with NGO SNV, the private sector, educational institutions, media, and the community as an effort to address domestic wastewater services. This study evaluates collaborative practices and formulates collaborative governance strategies based on the field findings. A qualitative case study was employed using role intersection analysis, social network analysis, and a collaborative governance framework evaluation. In-depth interviews were conducted with 20 cross-stakeholder informants. The fulfillment of collaborative governance indicators reached 73%, with weaknesses in institutional design, facilitative leadership, and collaboration outcomes, supported by unclear role distribution and low network density. In addition, the starting conditions of collaboration showed weak coordination and policies, low commitment and support, and fragmented implementation. The research also identified new contextual variables, such as community participation and typical procedural stages in the implementation of collaboration at the local level. Strategies developed through SWOT analysis include formalization of collaboration roles and mechanisms in a Mayor’s Regulation, strengthening of community empowerment-based programs, and establishment of a dedicated working group in the domestic wastewater sector. The findings and strategies provide recommendations for other local governments in designing collaborative and sustainable domestic wastewater governance models.

Growing recognition of Indigenous Peoples’ legal rights to forests has motivated an increase in collaborative forest governance in recent decades. Collaborative governance literature, however, has paid little attention to the influence of legal approaches. This paper explores two legal instruments, constitutionally entrenched rights and statutory rights, and their influence on six elements of collaborative governance identified in literature: starting conditions, institutional design, facilitative leadership, collaborative process, systems context and outcomes. In Canada, constitutionally entrenched and collective Indigenous rights are interpreted by the courts, resulting in a complex body of jurisprudence. Statutory rights in India are not constitutionally protected and focus on the individual, rather than the collective. In both countries, these legal instruments address conflict, injustice and forest access, and have led to the establishment of different forms of collaborative forest governance.

This study aimed to analyze collaborative governance in the implementation of vocational schools in Makassar City. Using a qualitative approach, data was collected through in-depth interviews with key informants, participatory observations, and document analysis. The results of this study show that collaborative governance in the implementation of vocational schools, as formulated by Ansell and Gash (starting condition, facilitative leadership, institutional design, collaborative process, and intermediate outcome) in the collaborative governance process, has not been fully implemented, and there are still stakeholders who have not participated in this field of work. In addition, we can see that in the implementation of the curriculum, fully collaborative governance has not worked according to the teaching staff, funding, and infrastructure supported by the results of interviews from the principal and Forestry vocational high school teachers Makassar, SMKN 3 Makassar, Telkom vocational school, and Jaya Negara vocational school, said that. The results of this research can be used as a basis for the development of an effective collaborative model for vocational schools in Makassar City. Keywords: collaborative, governance, stakeholders, vocational stud

This chapter examines collaborative approaches to the production of knowledge, policy, and public management as means for creating more accountable environmental governance. Exploring and comparing the rich and salient concepts of coproduction and comanagement allows linkage across these conversations in different bodies of literature to elucidate important ingredients of successful collaborative environmental governance. Collaborative approaches to both science and policymaking contribute the most public value. Collaboration makes accountable to the public what used to be left to “expert” managers and improves outcomes, providing greater accountability to both policy and science. Different disciplinary understandings of coproduction and comanagement are compared, and the idea is proposed that coproduction and comanagement can be brought together in a holistic approach to collaborative governance, joining science with social justice. Examples of collaborative governance approaches to forest management on public lands in the USA and Indonesia are examined using a comparative small-N case study approach, with particular attention to public accountability and sustainability transformations, to explore the most important elements of collaborative approaches to environmental governance. The case studies show that more inclusive and effective management is possible with comanagement, and more actionable science is possible through knowledge coproduction. The most effective forms of collaborative governance should actively include both coproduction of knowledge and comanagement over the longer term.

Collaborative territorial governance experiences play a fundamental role in improving public management to mitigate health and the economic crisis impacts due to COVID-19 pandemic. The Ministry of Interior (SEGOB, in Spanish) of the Mexican federal government implemented the methodology Neighborhoods Networks for Solidarity Support “Redes Vecinales de Apoyo Solidario” (REVES, in Spanish). It is a territorial organization system based on community co-responsibility that aims to improve the satisfaction of basic needs derived from the health and economic emergency caused by COVID-19, and is an example for municipalities throughout Mexico. REDES implies a collaborative territorial governance system. In this article we describe and analyze the actions carried out by seven municipalities that are executing the project. Keywords: territorial and collaborative governance, networks, public management, municipality