Collaboratives

Putting my work on the economic concepts aside for a while I now turn to the form that many communities use to organize and plan: collaboratives. The question for today is what does the literature on collaboratives define the concept as?

The empirical thing I am trying to get a handle on through this is the groups of community members, city employees, agency representatives and businesses that come together to create plans and collaborate to handle broad or specific problems within their communities and environments. These groups are more frequent and advocated for these days, notably in the form of community wildfire protection plans in wildfire response policy. These plans have no statutory force yet may be successfully improving wildfire response in communities across the United States.

Right out the gate the lack of specificity of this concept is troubling.  Emerson, Nabatchi and Balogh (2011) tackle the concept as collaborative governance. They propose a framework of  governance that tackles broad contextual variables, the environment and internal dynamics that make up governance. The most important part of this for me is the part that only shows up as a dotted-line box somewhere in the middle: the governance regime.

The CGR is the system for "public decision making in which cross-boundary collaboration represents the prevailing pattern of behavior and activity." Their definition is highly tautological. Collaborative Governance Regimes have public decision making with a prevailing pattern of cross-boundary collaboration.  In this article the system that frames the collaborative regime as well as the dynamics within the regime get multiple pages of development. The CGR heading has a single short paragraph in it. They systems a regime is situated in and the dynamics inside the regime matter. But what are the characteristics of a CGR and how do they vary? 

Koontz and Thomas (2006)  call this phenomenon "multisector collaborative arrangements". This particular piece is about the challenges and importance in knowing about the environmental outcomes of collaborative management in comparison to market or hierarchical management structures. The players in the arrangement in their definition should include "grassroots" and "bottom-up" actors even while governments are playing a 

"variety of roles". One role they focus on is the provision of funds to collaborative groups. The historical focus is on processes and normative arguments for collaboration. But I am still not sure what they are and what role they function.

It is easy to imagine a situation where agencies and watershed councils claim collaboration in order to get more money. What remains to be asked is what actual role do these collaboratives have in making policy? Do they have power? How do their decisions matter?

The obvious way to define a collaborative then is based on what it is not. A collaborative (process, governance regime) is one where there are multiple voices in a conversation about decisions including those that are not a part of a single central government (employee or elected official). That is a broad category. If the county and city are involved in a process then it might be considered a collaborative in Emerson et al's definition. 

Rather than go much further down this rabbit hole I want to set up multiple questions that I will be asking about collaboratives than emerge from this initial discussion.

• Do some collaboratives make policy?
• What are the outputs from collaborative processes?
• Is there a difference in the literature between a collaborative that is a recognized public (governmental) entity and those that are not (private, nonprofit)?
• What is a collaborative? No, seriously this time.
• Part 3
• When are collaboratives a strategy (not a rule or norm) and when aren't they?