How collaborative governance can make political systems more democratic and effective

Abstract

In Western liberal societies, assessments of governance performance include references to its democratic quality as well as its effectiveness. For decades, social scientists have debated to what extent and how it is possible to enhance democracy and effectiveness at the same time. Theories of representative government tend to assume that there is an inherent trade-off between citizen participation and government capacity that is best balanced by allowing for some degree of decentralization in an otherwise centralized government system. In contrast, recent strands of governance theory suggest that collaborative forms of governance can turn the trade-off between democracy and effectiveness into a plus-sum game through the integration of citizen participation and problem solving. This chapter teases out the functions that a governance system must serve to count as democratic and effective, respectively, and specifies what collaborative forms of governance has to offer in serving these functions. Moreover, it identifies an urgent need for studies of how different regime forms and political cultures condition collaborative governance.