Best Laid Plans

I took a short aside to prepare some data for a paper I am coauthoring with Edella Schlager and Tanya Heikkila for the 2012 APSA conference. While I intended to keep investigating Swimming Upstream instead I found a new set of readings that are as valuable as the core readings from that book I already covered. 

On suggestion from Kirk Emerson I am working through a 2006 Special Issue on Collaborative Public Management of Public Administration Review. This collection tackles both theoretical and practical matters of collaboratives, especially matters of government. This issue is the original publication of the subject  of one of my earliest posts, the Koontz and Thomas article on outputs of collaboratives.

This issue has a lot of very closely similar yet still competing conceptualizations of collaboratives. The definition used in the introduction by the editorial team is 

Collaborative public management is a concpet that describes the process of facilitating and operating in multi-organizational arrangements to solve problems that cannot be solved or easily solved by single organizations. Collaborative means to co-labor, to cooperate to achieve common goals, working across boundaries in multisector relationships. Cooperation is based on the value of reciprocity.

This is differentiated from participatory governance:

Participatory governance is the active involvement of citizens in government decision making. Governance means to steer the process that influences decisions and actions within the private public and civic sectors. 

This is a very different distinction than has been suggested elsewhere. The first is implied to be about implementation. Problems are actively solved with multiple organizations. This process of solving problems then has its own set of governing arrangements. Therefore collaborative governance can have participatory and nonparticipatory governance and participatory governance can oversee collaborative and noncollaborative management. 

This division seems to sync with the operational/collective choice/constitutional level divisions from Ostrom and IAD work. The actual management is operational. The governance is collective choice. What makes this messy is that a lot of collaboratives tend to set their own rules while simultaneously engaging in management activities at an individual and collective level. This distinction in other parts of the literature seems to be one of process versus outputs. Questions of how collaboratives govern themselves are about process and what they do operationally is a matter of outputs. This doesn't adequately address the situation because there are aspects of process that are framed by governance rules at a higher level that should not be confounded. 

This set of articles sets up a very nice conversation about collaboratives and where the literature is. I am actively seeing some hypotheses and research questions emerging and I am hoping that I can start posting some of those very soon. More PAR tomorrow.