Collaboration and the Environment

Designing collaborative governance that is fit for purpose: theorising policy support and voluntary action for road safety in Sweden

“…There is a tendency in the literature to be "celebratory and only rarely cautious" (O' Leary et al 2009, 6), neglecting risks associated with collaboration such as agency capture, mission drift, loss of organisational autonomy, costs, difficulty evaluating results, and problems with upholding public accountability (Gazley and Brudney 2007;Kallis et al 2009). Managers should have a clear purpose in mind and know what is to be achieved (in terms of solving public problems or creating public values) before engaging in collaboration; otherwise, it might not be worth the effort, and public resources should be directed elsewhere (Agranoff 2006;Huxham 2000Huxham , 2003Imperial et al 2018;Zachrisson et al 2018). It is also important that appropriate institutional designs, including decisions on whom to invite and how to organise and assign roles, largely depend on the purpose of the collaboration.…”

“…Collaborative governance is a "means to an end" (Scott and Thomas 2017, 193) that "public managers will (and should) structure / : : : / differently depending on their goals" (Prentice et al 2019, 802). The case made here is that collaborative governance is used purposively and strategically by public managers (Agranoff and McGuire 2003;Koontz et al 2004;Koontz and Thomas 2006;Milward and Provan 2006;Scott and Thomas 2017;Imperial et al 2018;Prentice et al 2019) and that the purpose it is meant to achieve will significantly affect the appropriate choice of institutional designs in terms of the authority and resources invested in the arrangement, its membership and structure, and the roles and interactions of different actors (Agranoff and McGuire 1998;Huxham 2000;Koontz et al 2004;Agranoff 2006;Milward and Provan 2006;Thomson and Perry 2006;Ansell and Gash 2012;Imperial et al 2018). With more hopes being placed in collaborative arrangements, and more public resources being devoted to creating them, it is becoming increasingly important to develop a nuanced theoretical understanding of what types of collaborative governance are suitable for what purposes, that is, to make collaborative governance fit for purpose.…”

“…Much theorising on collaborative governance adheres to institutional theoretical perspectives, focusing on structural conditions under which collaborative governance can be expected to work (Ostrom 1990;Margerum 2011). The second approach, emerging out of public management research, treats collaborative governance as an instrument used strategically and purposively by public managers to address complex policy problems in situations where working together is better than acting alone (Agranoff and McGuire 1998;Scott and Thomas 2017;Imperial et al 2018;Prentice et al 2019). Both approaches offer key insights into the dynamics of collaborative governance, and although there are tensions between them (O' Leary et al 2009;O'Leary and Vij 2012) they need to be integrated to advance theory and further knowledge about how different strategic purposes interact with institutional design decisions.…”

Influencing factors of knowledge collaboration effects in knowledge alliances

“…When the internal and external control parameters reach their threshold values, the collaborative relationship among elements replaces the competitive relationship, transferring the system from disorder to order. In this way, collaboration effects are achieved (Cheng, Gu, & Quan, 2017;Imperial, Prentice, & Brudney, 2018). As shown in Table 1, although the research field of knowledge collaboration is still in its initial development stage, various views have been put forward by different scholars.…”

Conceptualizing the Collaborative Toolbox: A Dimensional Approach to Collaboration

“…Scott and Thomas’s (2017, p. 192) conceptualization of “tool” helps explain the choice made by public managers to use the “collaborative toolbox” over other means of solving public problems. Whereas Scott and Thomas (2017) and others (e.g., Imperial, Prentice, & Brudney, 2018) explore from a policy orientation why public managers choose to collaborate , in this article, we seek to uncover from a management orientation how managers work together when collaboration is the chosen policy approach.…”