Abstract
Governments are increasingly applying collaborative approaches even though little is known about how effectively the outputs are implemented. This empirical study used the ‘Soil and Water’ Working Group of the Dialogue for Nature Consideration in Sweden to investigate which aspects of legitimacy influence the implementation of collaborative outputs. It included document analysis, observation and 38 interviews with participants and representatives of implementing organisations. Despite being recommendations and lacking authoritative rule, the outputs from a collaborative process are implemented to a very high degree in educational and planning material all over Sweden. The forest sector’s general perception of the outputs as having high procedural, source-based and substantive legitimacy has been crucial to their extensive implementation.
Highlights
Collaborative approaches to natural resource governance and man agement have been encouraged by legislation such as the European Union Water Framework Directive (WFD) and applied increasingly over the past few decades (Emerson and Nabatchi, 2015; Koontz and Newig, 2014)
The results from the qualitative interviews show that the extensive implementation can be explained by commercial forestry’s overall perception that the collaborative process and its outputs had high pro cedural, source-based and substantive legitimacy
As in other collaborative processes (Bjarstig et al, 2019), Environmental NGOs (ENGOs) dropped out but the NGO representative who remained engaged throughout the whole process, perceived procedural legitimacy as high
Summary
Collaborative approaches to natural resource governance and man agement have been encouraged by legislation such as the European Union Water Framework Directive (WFD) and applied increasingly over the past few decades (Emerson and Nabatchi, 2015; Koontz and Newig, 2014). With few exceptions (Biddle and Koontz, 2014; Scott, 2015; Biddle, 2017), these assessments have either investigated the process of collaboration (Ansell and Gash, 2008; Emerson and Nabatchi, 2015; Porter and Birdi, 2018) or used the number of outputs as a measure of effectiveness (Koontz and Newig, 2014; Bjarstig, 2017). Collaborative governance literature has largely ignored this aspect of implementation (Koontz and Newig, 2014), despite that exploring it is one way of evaluating the effectiveness of a governance process (Hogl et al, 2012)
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