Outputs from Collaboratives

Having banged our heads against the wall about what collaboratives are for a while I am taking a break to look at two different papers on what actually comes out of collaborative endeavors. Koontz (2003) and Lubbel (2004) both ask if anything actually happens when a collaborative acts. Koonts asks questions about differences in plans and whether or not the plans are lowest common denominator to accommodate the disparate interests involved in the collaborative endeavor or if major changes emerge. Lubbel asks if collaborative efforts actually increase cooperation within a community or if they just create symbolic policy, another way of saying just making those involved feel good. Neither of these studies results in good and interesting developments for collaboratives and variation between them. But they do give some good ground on how to progress in studying them.

Koontz provides an interesting analysis that asks if differences in the institutional arrangements (he calls process variables) results in differences in plans. Process variables consist of a number of factors internal to the collaborative such as how the group selects members, how they make decisions (consensus, majority), what resources the collaborative has access to and how widely representative the group is. Also controlled for are contextual variables such as the level of community concern, level of pre-existing networks, existing rules and current land use and urbanization.

His results do not show significant influence of any process variable on the contents of a particular plan in this case. The plans had 4 levels of "sophistication" (meaning development, not normative value) including length, meeting standard requirements, number of policy recommendations and completed recommended but not required analyses beyond the basic requirements. None of these varied based on process variables he measured. Instead context seemed to matter, with the content and length of plans being more in response to developing communities or communities on the borders of developing and growing urban areas. Threat prompted action. 

This leads well into the Lubbel piece, because while the outputs of the collaboratives he studied included plans, the dependent variable was actually changes in cooperative behavior of people in the estuary or consensus about policy. This study did not look at variation within collaboratives. Instead it looked at variation between estuaries with collaboratives and those without to see what difference the collaboratives made, if any. One possible set of outputs from collaborative endeavors are symbols to assuage uncertainty and threats felt by stakeholders. In the above study threatened communities may engage in collaborative efforts simply to feel better about the situation and not actually change anyone's behavior. The results are interesting and very limited. 

Lubbel's results show that in cases with a collaborative group making a plan cooperation was no higher than in those without. The difference was in consensus. The theory he proposes to explain this comes from the Advocacy Coalitions Framework, where actors' core and secondary beliefs mediate almost every action. He explains the results as changes in secondary beliefs rather than changes in behavior. 

Tying these two together seems to show that more effort is put into collaboratives that feel threatened, and that threat is assuaged by the endeavor itself, not by changes in behavior resulting from a plan, increased trust or better networks. Luckily both of these studies are limited in their generalizability and only attempts at expanding theory. It is still a fruitful area for investigation on what, if anything, do collaboratives achieve.