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In recent years, many governments have embraced new modes of economic governance that rely on public-private partnerships. These forms of governance effectively devolve authority and responsibility from the state, and instead rely on the policy networks found in civil society.This article argues that despite the general enthusiasm for such decentralized collaboration, there is significant variation in its meaning and practice. Comparing the public-private partnership strategies of two governments in Ontario in the 1990s, the article analyzes the origins and progress of two distinctive governance paradigms, looking for signs of economic innovation.The case studies demonstrate that each of the social democratic and neoliberal paradigms contains its own specific representational logic, organizational design, and policy purpose. The article underscores the analytical importance of linking the study of decentralized policy networks at the meso or local scale to macro-level political and economic factors that condition their operation and effects. It concludes with a discussion of the obstacles to institutional innovation in Ontario, and the conditions that facilitate successful public-private partnerships in economic governance.

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In recent years, interest has grown in collaboration in public policy. Responding to the complex issues now playing out in cities, scholars are focusing on localized governance relations that blur boundaries between public, private, and community sectors. This article introduces discursive localism as a framework to understand better collaborative urban governance. It argues that ideas play a pivotal role in motivating collective action, channeling policy resources, and shaping governance relations. Although recent urban-focused accounts of collective action suggest a role for ideas, systematic attention to their normative-philosophical and cognitive-programmatic dimensions reveals how different policy discourses frame incentives and institutions for collaboration. Applying discursive localism to Toronto, Canada, the article describes change processes across three complex policy fields. Governance arrangements are argued to flow from the operative policy discourses, especially whether their normative and cognitive dimensions are integrated, dissociated, or fragmented.