There has been a growing interest in the question of how to spur innovation in the public sector, and recent research points to multi-actor collaboration as a superior innovation driver. This article ...explains why and how multi-actor collaboration may spur public innovation. It also discusses why we should expect different public and private actors to engage in demanding processes of collaborative interaction in order to produce risk-filled public innovations. Finally, it reflects on how it is possible to overcome the barriers to collaborative innovation through a combination of institutional design and the exercise of leadership and management.
This article explores whether co-creation offers a viable path for the public sector. After an initial account of the transformation of the public sector from a legal authority and a service provider ...to an arena of co-creation, it defines co-creation and provides some empirical examples. This is followed by a discussion of the risks and benefits of co-creation as well as the drivers and barriers that may stimulate or hamper its expansion. The article also reflects on how institutional design, public leadership, and systemic change can advance co-creation. The conclusion summarizes the findings by setting out some researchable propositions.
Encouraged by the proliferation of governance networks and the growing demands for public innovation, this article aims to advance “collaborative innovation” as a cross-disciplinary approach to ...studying and enhancing public innovation. The article explains the special conditions and the growing demand for public innovation, and demonstrates how it can be enhanced through multiactor collaboration. The case for collaborative innovation is supported by insights from three different social science theories. The theoretical discussion leads to the formulation of an analytical model that can be used in future studies of collaborative innovation in the public sector.
Efforts are intensifying to spur innovation in the public sector, and multiactor collaboration seems to offer a viable strategy for doing so. However, though government actors are relatively keen to ...involve citizens and civil society actors in the design and implementation of innovative solutions, co-initiation of public innovation is rare. As a result, local governments often fail to tap into the experiences, ideas, and resources of civic actors when identifying and defining problems and challenges that call for innovative solutions. To explore the conditions, process, and impact of co-initiated public innovations in urban spaces, this article analyzes three Danish cases of co-initiation. The empirical cases are described and compared to identify the conditions of co-initiation, describe the different phases in the collaborative process, and assess the various impacts. The article also reflects on the role of institutional design and leadership in facilitating co-initiation of collaborative innovation.
This article aims to initiate a conversation about the democratic quality of co-creation. There is growing interest in co-creation as a tool for mobilizing societal resources, enhancing creative ...problem-solving, and building broad-based ownership for public solutions. While researchers have focused on the contribution of co-creation to improving the efficiency and effectiveness of public governance, few researchers have discussed the democratic quality of co-creation. This lacuna is filled by exploring the democratic contribution of co-creation through a comparison with well-known forms of democracy. The claim is that the democratic quality of co-creation lies in its ability to empower lay actors to take part in cross-boundary collaboration that may lead to creative problem-solving and to the exercise of a shared power based on joint agreements about innovative public value outcomes. The article is mainly theoretical and engaged in prospective analysis but also draws on empirical examples to illustrate the theoretical points.
Governance researchers have repeatedly discussed how to make public governance more accountable given the relatively 'thin' accountability of representative government. Recent decades have seen the ...growth of new, compensatory forms of accountability. However, these measures do not seem have satisfied the demands for strengthening public sector accountability. Drawing on the concept of social accountability, this article challenges common wisdom in arguing that collaborative governance may enhance public governance accountability, although it also raises new accountability problems that must be tackled. The article develops a heuristic framework for empirical studies of accountability, which improves the impact of collaborative forms of governance.
This paper argues that elected politicians may strengthen their political leadership role by initiating, orchestrating and engaging in the co-creation of public value outcomes. The collaborative turn ...in public value theory shows how public managers may mobilize the knowledge, ideas and resources of users, citizens and organized stakeholders, but it has so far neglected the role of elected politicians who tend to be reduced to a legitimizing sounding board for public managers aiming to advance public value creation in collaboration with a plethora of public and private actors. This paper seeks to compensate this benign neglect by advancing a new notion of 'interactive political leadership'. This new construct aims to conceptualize the way that elected politicians may develop new and better policy solutions through a problem-focused interaction with relevant and affected actors from the economy and civil society, including users, volunteers, citizens and other lay actors. The theoretical argument about the development of interactive political leadership, which takes us beyond the traditional forms of sovereign political leadership that perceives politicians as 'elected kings', is illustrated by empirical examples drawn from local, national and supranation levels of government.
Governance through the negotiated interaction of a plurality of public, semi‐public and private actors seems to provide an efficient means for governing our increasingly complex, fragmented and ...multi‐layered societies. However, the big question is whether governance networks also contribute to the democratic governance of society. Governance network theory and post‐liberal theories of democracy claim that there are both democratic problems and potentials associated with interactive network governance. In order to be able to assess, and possibly improve, the democratic performance of governance networks, the authors of this article develop and substantiate an analytical model for measuring the democratic anchorage of governance networks in different political constituencies and in an appropriate set of democratic rules and norms. In addition, it is argued that politicians should play a key role in efforts to ensure the democratic anchorage of governance networks.
This Element aims to build, promote, and consolidate a new social science research agenda by defining and exploring the concepts of turbulence and robustness, and subsequently demonstrating the need ...for robust governance in turbulent times. Turbulence refers to the unpredictable dynamics that public governance is currently facing in the wake of the financial crisis, the refugee crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, the inflation crisis etc. The heightened societal turbulence calls for robust governance aiming to maintain core functions, goals and values by means of flexibly adapting and proactively innovating the modus operandi of the public sector. This Element identifies a broad repertoire of robustness strategies that public governors may use and combine to respond robustly to turbulence. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Studying collaborative governance has become a
booming business. However, the empirical literature still struggles to produce robust generalizations and cumulative knowledge that link contextual, ...situational and institutional design factors to processes and outcomes. We still have not mustered the broad and deep evidence base that will really help us sort fact from fiction and identify more and less productive approaches to collaboration. The current empirical evidence in the study of collaborative governance consists chiefly of small-N case studies or large-N surveys. The challenge is to move from case-
based,
mid-
range
theory building to more largeN-
driven systematic theory-
testing,
while also retaining the rich contextual and process insights that only small-N studies tend to yield. This article, and the articles in the accompanying special issue, introduces an attempt to provide this middle ground
- the Collaborative Governance Case Database. The database has been developed to serve as a
free common pool resource for researchers to systematically collect and compare high-
quality
collaborative governance case studies. This article is an introduction to the database, exploring its design, opportunities and limitations. This article is also an invitation; inviting all researchers to freely use the cases in the database for their own research interest and to help strengthening the database by adding new cases there are eager to share with colleagues.
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