Despite the growing body of literature on participatory and collaborative governance, little is known about citizens' motives for participation in such new governance arrangements. The present article argues that knowledge about these motives is essential for understanding the quality and nature of participatory governance and its potential contribution to the overall political and administrative system. Survey data were used to explore participants' motives for participating in a large-scale urban renewal program in Stockholm, Sweden. The program was neighborhood-based, characterized by self-selected and repeated participation, and designed to influence local decisions on the use of public resources. Three types of motives were identified among the participants: (a) Common good motives concerned improving the neighborhood in general and contributing knowledge and competence. (b) Self-interest motives reflected a desire to improve one's own political efficacy and to promote the interest of one's own group or family. (c) Professional competence motives represented a largely apolitical type of motive, often based on a professional role. Different motives were expressed by different categories of participants and were also associated with different perceptions concerning program outcomes. Further analysis suggested that participatory governance may represent both an opportunity for marginalized groups to empower themselves and an opportunity for more privileged groups to act as local "citizen representatives" and articulate the interests of their neighborhoods. These findings call for a more complex understanding of the role and potential benefits of participatory governance.

Evaluation and network governance are both among the top-10 trendy concepts in public policy. But how are they related? In the present article, we ask how public sector interventions guided by a network governance doctrine are to be evaluated. If evaluation means systematic judgment of organization, content, administration, outputs and effects in public policy, then evaluators need concepts and analytical tools to assess these features and communicate their analyses. In the literature, interest in network modes of governance often goes together with a call for a renewed vocabulary for evaluation and policy analysis. In the article, we do not take this to be a fact. Instead we turn it into a question: How relevant and productive are established concepts and tools of evaluation theory for evaluating network governance? More specifically, we address the issues of purposes and merit criteria in evaluation of interventions fashioned according to the network governance doctrine. Though it takes some elaboration, our overall conclusion is that at least some standard evaluation concepts and approaches are still productive in delineating, analysing and prescribing how network governance can be evaluated. There are crucial accountability issues to raise, the goal-achievement criterion is not irrelevant and the meaning of stakeholder evaluation is elucidated when confronted with the ideas of the network governance doctrine.

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Research finds that productive interfaces between collaborative and bureaucratic forms of governance hinges on the extent to which public managers act as competent boundary spanners who process information, accommodate communication and align and coordinate behavior, and it seems likely that politicians have an equally important role to play in aligning processes and arenas of collaborative governance with representative democracy. The empirical forms that political boundary making takes are examined in a study of 28 cases of local, regional or national level policy-making in nine Western countries. This study indicates that there is considerable variation in the way politicians perform political boundary spanning particularly with respect to their degree of engagement in collaborative policymaking arenas and the focus of their boundary-spanning activities. Furthermore, the study shows that collaborative governance tends to go best in tandem with representative democracy in those cases where politicians perform both hands off and hands on boundary-spanning activities.

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