Ideas and Collaborative Governance

Abstract

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.

The Sustainability of Shared Mobility in London: The Dilemma for Governance

“…Bradford suggests that the differences between cognitive and normative paradigms in the policy discourse should be revealed in relation to the agents of change and governance structures [20]. The distinction between cognitive and normative paradigms, and how they reflect on the agents and governance regimes is particularly helpful in analysing different urban futures involving sharing.…”

“…Ideational analysis that explores the role of ideas in policy changes is particularly helpful in the face of uncertainty and in understanding the governance process that blurs the boundaries between public and private [20]. Rethinking the actors' incentives and the existing local institutions in terms of ideas provides a useful framing tool to shed light on the causalities in political processes, and a better understanding of the beliefs on which the actions are based [19,20].…”

“…Framed within discursive institutionalism, the discursive localism approach proposed by Bradford brings ideas together with an understanding of the urban governance process, and it provides the means to frame the empirical findings of this research [20]. Bradford suggests that the differences between cognitive and normative paradigms in the policy discourse should be revealed in relation to the agents of change and governance structures [20].…”

“…Ideas in this context can be generally defined as (normative and cognitive) 'paradigms', indicated by theories, conceptual models, worldviews, frames, and principled beliefs [24,27]. Cognitive paradigms are taken-for-granted paradigms, such as gendered division of labour, which are descriptions that specify cause-effect relationship, while normative frameworks are defined as collectively-shared expectations, values, attitudes, and identities [20,27].…”

“…Drawing on the ideational analysis [20], which examines ideas (e.g., perceptions, worldviews, beliefs, etc.) in terms of their impacts on incentives and institutions and eventually how they inform policy changes, we assess the implications of the perceptions from 2013 for the policy discourse in 2017 in London.…”