Abstract
Governance collaborations between public and private partners are increasingly used to promote sustainable mountain development, yet information is limited on their nature and precise extent. This article analyzes collaboration on environment and natural resource management in Swedish mountain communities to critically assess the kinds of issues these efforts address, how they evolve, who leads them, and what functional patterns they exhibit based on Margerum's (2008) typology of action, organizational, and policy collaboration. Based on official documents, interviews, and the records of 245 collaborative projects, we explore the role of the state, how perceptions of policy failure may inspire collaboration, and the opportunities that European Union funds have created. Bottom-up collaborations, most of which are relatively recent, usually have an action and sometimes an organizational function. Top-down collaborations, however, are usually organizational or policy oriented. Our findings suggest that top-down and bottom-up collaborations are complementary in situations with considerable conflict over time and where public policies have partly failed, such as for nature protection and reindeer grazing. In less contested areas, such as rural development, improving tracks and access, recreation, and fishing, there is more bottom-up, action-oriented collaboration. State support, especially in the form of funding, is central to explaining the emergence of bottom-up action collaboration. Our findings show that the state both initiates and coordinates policy networks and retains a great deal of power over the nature and functioning of collaborative governance. A practical consequence is that there is great overlap—aggravated by sectorized approaches—that creates a heavy workload for some regional partners.
Highlights
Mountain regions around the world, they make up about a quarter of Earth’s land area, have failed to keep up with the growth of environmental, social, and economic capital in surrounding areas (Maselli 2012)
How can patterns of top-down and bottom-up collaboration in the mountain region be understood? Do they perform different functions, as proposed by Margerum (2008)? For each type of collaboration, we investigate its main purpose, which actors are leading it, and what patterns of interaction can be discerned on themes that are important to the Swedish mountain region (SEPA 2011)
We focus on 3 aspects drawn from the literature: (1) the role of the state in top-down and bottom-up collaboration, (2) how perceptions of policy failure may contribute to collaborative solutions, and (3) the opportunities European Union (EU) funds have created
Summary
Mountain regions around the world, they make up about a quarter of Earth’s land area, have failed to keep up with the growth of environmental, social, and economic capital in surrounding areas (Maselli 2012). We use the concept of collaborative governance to distinguish situations in which public and private actors work together to resolve a particular issue or take action for a public purpose that could otherwise not be accomplished (Emerson et al 2012) This governing arrangement could be top down, initiated by public agencies (Ansell and Gash 2007), or bottom up, in the form of network structures initiated by nongovernment actors (McGuire 2006: 35–36). We investigate the prevalence of those functions in top-down versus bottom-up arrangements and discuss the implications thereof This sheds light on which types of collaborations can address what problems and what role the government plays in those.
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