Managing Incentive Dynamics for Collaborative Governance in Land and Ecological Conservation

Public governance often involves policy tools and stakeholders from multiple sectors. How different policy tools are used may affect the chances that the values and interests of diverse stakeholders can be aligned in mutually supportive ways. Drawing on insights from behavioral and cognitive economics, this article uses the case of land and ecological conservation in Twin Lake, Taiwan, to illustrate how various interactive dynamics—hierarchical exclusion and preemptive effects—may affect efforts in land and ecological conservation involving stakeholders from multiple sectors. Such illustrations may inform the choice and sequencing of policy tools for facilitating collaborative governance.     

On Developing an Inter-Agency Trust Scale for Assessing Governance Networks in the Public Sector

ABSTRACT

This article presents the development and validation of a psychometric scale for assessing public sector inter-agency trust. The instrument is grounded in contemporary trust theory and methodologically adapted from a measure developed for private sector alliances. Tested using four discrete studies of governance networks, each addressing transboundary environmental issues such as climate change and fisheries, the scale exhibits reasonably valid psychometric properties while also enabling visualized analysis of networked trust distributions. Based on this work, we outline further research needs with a view to stimulating greater trust research in governance networks and facilitating more collaborative and innovative policy outcomes in the public sector.     

Collaborative Innovation,New Technologies,and Work Redesign

Stakeholders agree on the need to promote innovation in work organization in public services. This article deploys the concept of collaborative innovation to discuss employees' and managers' experiences of a major technology‐driven work redesign project within National Health Service pharmacy services in Scotland. The authors draw on extant literature on New Public Management (NPM) and collaborative approaches to innovation to frame more than 40 in‐depth interviews with managers and employees. They find that key components of collaborative innovation—related to joint problem‐solving, interdisciplinary working, and mutual learning—were important to the success of the redesign project and had positive impacts on job quality for some employees. The authors argue that researchers and policy makers should look beyond NPM‐driven models that have dominated some areas of the public innovation literature to consider the potential added value of collaborative innovation to improving both work and service delivery in the public sector.     

Board Diversity,Stakeholder Representation,and Collaborative Performance in Community Mediation Centers

Does board diversity or representativeness influence organizational performance? Though it is understudied in both the public and the nonprofit sectors, learning more about this critical subject can enhance organizational performance within highly collaborative settings. Community mediation centers, which rely on multiple public and private resources to meet their programmatic objectives, provide excellent case studies for analyzing the impact of different kinds of interorganizational linkages on organizational performance. A multitheoretic view incorporating agency, resource dependence, and stakeholder perspectives is employed through a national sample and a two‐stage analysis using a logic model to test the cumulative impact of board characteristics and interorganizational relationships on organizational outcomes. Organizations’ collaborative capacity depends on several kinds of boundary‐spanning activities, including network ties, revenue sources, and the number of stakeholder groups represented on the board.     

Knowledge for Governance,Governance of Knowledge: Inclusive Knowledge Management in Collaborative Governance Processes

ABSTRACT

Different ways of knowing (WOKs) present in governance processes easily give rise to controversies and conflicts and forestall collective action. To resolve these conflicts it is necessary to understand what constitutes a WOK and how we can organize inclusion through collaborative governance. This paper argues that WOKs contain different knowledge elements: they contain different bodies of factual knowledge, formulate specific knowledge questions, and prefer different methods and knowledge institutes. WOKs also encompass different frames, interpretations, or normative perceptions of reality. And finally, different WOKs make use of different sources and types of organizing capacity.

Realizing successful collaborative governance processes means organizing inclusion of these different components of knowledge. This paper investigates the implications of this knowledge diversity for realizing collaborative governance processes and the challenges for inclusive knowledge management—through an in-depth case study of a collaborative governance process between the Netherlands and Flanders.

We conclude that realizing inclusion between various WOKs and their knowledge components contributes to the overall success of a collaborative governance process. However, managing inclusive knowledge is as much a matter of conscious strategies as it is the result of an emergent interaction process between stakeholders, experts, and officials within various WOKs. Furthermore, although knowledge inclusion facilitates successful negotiation between stakeholders, it doesn't guarantee a successful outcome of these negotiations.     

Does the Network Centrality of Government Actors Matter? Examining the Role of Government Organizations in Aquaculture Partnerships

The growth in the use of collaborative governance arrangements has been accompanied by burgeoning scholarship in the field of public affairs that seeks to understand the benefits of engaging diverse stakeholders in common venues. However, few scholars have formally assessed the role of government actors in facilitating outcomes for individual participants in such efforts. Moreover, little work on collaborative governance examines how individual incentives and barriers to collective action are formed within the nested nature of these contexts. We contribute to the study of collaborative governance by formally investigating how the relative centrality of government actors in collaborative policy‐making venues affects individual relationship building and learning for participants therein. We find that government actor centrality is positively associated with relationship building and learning. However, in testing two different conceptualizations of “centrality,” we find that the definition of this construct clearly matters.     

Collaborative Governance: Integrating Management,Politics, and Law

Scholars have engaged in an ongoing dialogue about the relationships among management, politics, and law in public administration. Collaborative governance presents new challenges to this dynamic. While scholars have made substantial contributions to our understanding of the design and practice of collaborative governance, others suggest that we lack theory for this emerging body of research. Law is often omitted as a variable. Scholarship generally does not explicitly include collaboration as a public value. This article addresses the dialogue on management, politics, and law with regard to collaborative governance. It provides an overview of the current legal framework for collaborative governance in the United States at the federal, state, and local levels of government and identifies gaps. The institutional analysis and development framework provides a body of theory that incorporates rules and law into research design. The article concludes that future research on collaborative governance should incorporate the legal framework as an important variable and collaboration as a public value.     

论合同治理和关系治理的互补性与有效性

正式的合同治理与非正式的关系治理是互补性的。相关研究通常将关系治理和合同治理看作是可替代性的,因为信任能降低交易成本,也能够替代正式合同的刹手闸作用。研究表明:合同治理不仅不会阻止关系治理的发展或者成为关系性治理的替代者,相反,良好的、详尽的合同实际上会提升交易各方间长期的、合作性的信任关系;良好的合同缩小了与交易相关的风险范畴,并降低了其严重性,因而会鼓励和促进合作与信任关系的发展;良好的合同通过强化对有关交易的风险,如道德风险的惩罚,有助于长期交易关系的发展;关系治理也有助于合作者间发展出有关处理不确定性的柔性规则和程序,当不可预见的事件发生后,有助于合作伙伴间的相互调适,从而维持双方的交易关系,并因此提高交易效率。     

Infrastructural state capacity in the digital age: What drives the performance of COVID-19 tracing apps?

In a context where states increasingly complement their physical presence with digital means, the classic idea of infrastructural state power needs reconsideration. The COVID-19 pandemic represents an unparalleled opportunity to that end, given the uniformity of one type of digital infrastructural intervention—the offer of contact tracing apps- and its highly varying performance across geographies. Against this backdrop, the article seeks to expand traditional discussions on state infrastructural power by testing a series of propositions on the explanatory factors behind tracing apps' emergence and adoption rates. The findings stemming from a pool of 150 countries show no straightforward connection between traditional and digital forms of infrastructural power. They also point at the primacy of governmental trust over financial, institutional, and technological factors—including privacy standards—when explaining high adoption, suggesting that the relational aspect of infrastructural power acquires a proportionally greater weight in the digital era.     

When state‐level institutions cannot tell the whole story: An inquiry into municipal variations in quality of government

The lion's share of comparative research on corruption, good governance, and quality of government (QoG) has been cross‐country. However, a growing body of literature has begun to explore within‐country variations observed at the subnational level regarding corruption and social trust. The existence of such variations implies that state‐level institutions are not capable of telling the entire story and that quality of subnational‐level institutions might be important determinants of within‐country variations regarding, for instance, trust. This article delves into the Swedish case, an egalitarian country that scores high in international indices on lack of corruption and social trust; hence, a “least likely case” of subnational variations in both QoG and trust. Using two unique data sets, we find variations in both municipal QoG and social trust. In line with theory, we find that “local QoG” is associated with individual levels of community trust. This finding—in a low‐corrupt, high‐trust egalitarian society—strengthens the universality of the QoG‐perspective.     

Does Collaboration Make Any Difference? Linking Collaborative Governance to Environmental Outcomes

This paper addresses two research questions: (1) Does collaborative environmental governance improve environmental outcomes? and (2) How do publicly supported collaborative groups with different levels of responsibility, formalization, and representativeness compare in this regard? Using a representative watershed quality data series, the EPA's National Rivers and Streams Assessment and Wadeable Streams Assessment, in conjunction with a watershed management regime database coded for this analysis, I test the relationship between collaborative governance and watershed quality for 357 watersheds. Since these are observational data, a multilevel propensity score matching method is used to control for selection bias. Using an augmented inverse propensity weighted estimator, I estimate the average treatment effect on the treated for six different water quality and habitat condition metrics. Collaborative watershed groups are found to improve water chemistry and in‐stream habitat conditions. I then use hierarchical linear regression modeling to examine how group responsibilities, membership diversity, and formalization affect the predicted impact of a collaborative group. Groups that engage in management activities (in comparison to coordination or planning) are found to achieve greater environmental gains. Limited differentiation is found with regards to the presence of a group coordinator, increased goal specificity, or greater stakeholder diversity.     

Antecedents or Processes? Determinants of Perceived Effectiveness of Interorganizational Collaborations for Public Service Delivery

ABSTRACT

This article introduces a framework of antecedents, processes, and perceived outcomes to evaluate interorganizational collaborations for children and family service delivery in Los Angeles County, California. The results showed that resource acquisitions, organizational legitimacy, partner characteristics, and supply-side preconditions for collaboration could affect perceived collaboration outcomes. The effects of most of antecedents on perceived outcomes were, however, mediated by collaborative processes and perceived effectiveness of collaborative ventures were mainly premised on the existence of processes for leveraging resources and building trust between partners.     

Inequality,Diversity and Social Trust in Norwegian Communities

This article examines community effects on social trust in Norwegian communities. The large research literature on social trust agrees that community effects are important, but disagree about which aspects of communities influence social trust. The main current disagreement concerns the relative importance of ethnic diversity and socio-economic factors, such as income inequality within communities and differences in socio-economic standing between communities. We test the competing propositions on a Norwegian dataset consisting of 99 communities and 6,166 survey respondents within those communities arguing that it is particularly interesting to look at the relationship between diversity and social trust in the setting of a wealthy universalist welfare state. It is to our knowledge the first dataset that allows a hierarchical analysis of the determinants of social trust in the Norwegian context. The results of our models show that economic inequality, within and between communities, has a direct negative effect on social trust, but that it is not possible to separate the effects of ethnic diversity and level of unemployment. This study thus lends support to the body of research that first and foremost emphasizes the role of economic inequality in accounts of community differences and social trust.     

Motivational dilemmas in collaborative learning activities: The case of the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA)

Complex social and environmental problems—such as climate change, rural poverty, and over‐fishing—defy simple policy solutions. An increasing number of scholars, practitioners, and policy makers now agree that coming to grips with such problems requires more collaborative and adaptive forms of learning and decision‐making. Such approaches seek to involve a variety of stakeholders to learn about system‐level effects of past human decisions and adapt future management decisions to the lessons learned. While there are plenty of success stories at the local level, the collaborative learning approach has turned out to be difficult to implement at broader scales—in large public organizations and in society at large. This article provides an explanation for such shortcomings, arguing that the creation of collaborative learning systems is plagued by several motivational dilemmas. By systematically mapping out the institutional incentives of the potential participants in collaborative learning activities, it is argued that one can gain a better understanding of the likelihood that adaptive systems will actually work. These ideas are tested on the case of the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida). It is found that most Sida staff face conflicting incentives to engage in collaborative learning, but there are opportunities for management to strengthen such incentives. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Antecedents of task performance: An examination of transformation leadership,team communication,team creativity,and team trust

Higher education requires best leaders and collaborative environment to stimulate staff and student because of facing more challenges and to make the educational institutions remain relevant in a competitive global context. Considering the fruitful academic outcome, ideal leadership style and collaborative work are essential among teachers and students. Therefore, an empirical study was performed to investigate the effect of transformational leadership and team communication on task performance. The proposed model was verified by quantitative study to clarify the complex relationship between predicators and outcomes. Research data were collected from a sample of 273 master students from the University of Science and Technology of China. The collected data were examined through partial least square analysis technique. The results suggested that team perception of transformation leadership has positive effect on team communication and team trust to measure high task performance. In addition, team communication has positive effect on team trust, whereas team trust has a significant effect on team creativity, which enhances the task performance.     

Local Governance Arrangements and Democratic Outcomes (with Some Evidence from the Italian Case)

This article carries a broad definition of public–private concertation as a flexible form of governance that is able to overcome the distinction between network governance and participatory governance. It creates a unified framework relying on a process‐related democratic approach in order to properly assess these practices in their democratic outcomes. This allows the article to fully depict how local governance arrangements affect local democracy, both positively and negatively. Drawing on four exemplary cases of urban policies developed in the Province of Milan, it highlights two variables that give account of the democratic implication of these practices: the role of the political leadership and the inclusive strategy that they adopt. Moreover, it underlines four additional factors that help more democratic outcomes: presence of cognitive justification, quality of participation, active opposition, and an outward communication.     

A Framework for Assessing Power in Collaborative Governance Processes

The growing use of collaborative methods of governance raises concerns about the relative power of participants in such processes and the potential for exclusion or domination of some parties. This research offers a framework for assessing power that considers authority, resources, and discursive legitimacy as sources of power and considers the participants, the process design, and the content of collaborative governance processes as arenas for power use. A case study of a collaborative governance process is presented and analyzed using the power framework. Implications for the design of collaborative governance processes are discussed, including the benefits of a multidimensional definition of power, tools for managing power imbalances among participants, and strategies that participants can use to participate more fully in collaborative governance processes.     

Democratizing the Administrative State: Connecting Neighborhood Councils and City Agencies

Citizen participation in government decision making, especially at the local level, has received heightened attention with regard to its promise for improved governance. The overarching administrative ethos of the administrative state creates barriers to citizen participation in governance. Developing and nurturing citizen participation in the presence of the administrative state is a significant challenge. Drawing on the literary tradition of public engagement and learning, this article models a developmental strategy of participation that offers one avenue for achieving meaningful partnerships between city agencies and neighborhood councils in a metropolitan environment. We present a model of citizen participation that brings neighborhood councils and city agencies together in a collaborative partnership. This model is based on the literature on citizen participation, which focuses on the significance of interactive processes in building trust among participants and creating mutual understanding and agreement.     

Realized Publicness at Public and Private Research Universities

Although research‐extensive universities in the United States produce similar outcomes—research, teaching, and service—they vary substantially in terms of the publicness of their environments. In this article, the authors adopt a public values framework to examine how regulative, normative/associative, and cultural cognitive components affect realized public outcomes by faculty. Using survey data from a random sample of faculty scientists in six fields of science and engineering at Carnegie Research I universities, findings show that organizational and individual public values components are associated predictably with different realized individual public outcomes. For example, individual support from federal resources and affiliation with a federal lab (associative) are related to increased research outcomes, while tuition and fee levels (regulative) explain teaching outcomes, and perceived level of influence in the workplace (cultural cognitive) explains teaching and service outcomes.