Can the Power of Platforms be Harnessed for Governance?

The platform concept examines how strategic leadership and institutional and technological resources enable multiple distributed activities to innovate, adapt, and change. The central question addressed in this paper is: Can this potentially powerful organizing logic be harnessed for public purposes? Since governance platforms are still largely experimental, we cannot fully settle this question at present. However, we can begin to address the issue to help scholars and practitioners explore the potential of platforms. We start with a general statement about what governance platforms might offer to the public sector, before probing the concept more deeply. We then investigate the institutional mechanisms that purportedly make platforms powerful and propose a typology of governance platforms. Finally, we investigate the challenges and successes they have encountered

Between win-win and the manufacturing of consent : collaborative governance as a lightning rod in cannabis policy

Scholarship on collaborative governance emphasizes the importance of creating win-win situations as a way of generating policy innovation and effective problem-solving. However, the dynamics of collaboration are often more complicated than discovering mutual gains. An analysis of Cannabis legalization in the San Francisco Bay Area finds that “getting to yes” is often a subtle mixture of finding common ground and the manufacturing of consent. This means that some participants take the role of entrepreneurs in the collaborative process and push discursive dynamics towards a dominant perspective. Exploring the importance of power and politics in collaborative governance, the case illuminates how arena design, discourse, and coalition-building shape the scope and character of consensus formationPeer reviewe

Co-Creation for Sustainability

The ebook edition of this title is Open Access and freely available to read online. The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) set an ambitious agenda for global problem-solving and create a framework to achieve it through the power of partnerships. Goal 17 points to the central importance of partnerships, networks, and multi-stakeholder collaborations for bringing together a broad range of actors to accomplish the first 16 goals. Only through such partnerships can the distributed knowledge, resources and capacity of government agencies, private enterprises, political activists, local communities, and international NGOs be effectively combined to produce the major breakthroughs in sustainability that the SDGs envision. Co-Creation for Sustainability sets out a strategy of partnership, with an emphasis on how global goals can be translated into local action. Co-creation brings multiple parties together—including citizens—to collaboratively engage in innovative problem-solving. The book explains this strategy and describes how to foster the conditions necessary for its success. It details how leaders can spur co-creation and manage and overcome its practical challenges. Written to inspire public and private changemakers to find fundamental solutions to the pressing challenges that confront our social and natural environment, Co-creation for Sustainability: The UN SDGs and the Power of Partnerships provides intellectual resources and practical advice relevant for those who aspire to harness the talents, energy and perspectives of different sectors to build the momentum we need to realize a sustainable future

Metagoverning the Co-Creation of Green Transitions:A Socio-Political Contingency Framework

While the planet Earth will survive the accelerating climate and nature crisis, humankind may not. As part of its work to halt the global climate and nature crisis, while generating a distributed prosperity, the United Nations has unanimously agreed on sustainable development goals. The achievement of these goals depends on the mobilization of local knowledge and resources, and the creation of a sense of joint ownership over new and bold solutions. Co-creation that brings together relevant and affected actors in emergent processes of collaboration, learning, and innovation offer a path to localized green transitions. However, little is known about how public governance can prompt, support, and scaffold the local co-creation of green solutions. Bridging extant literatures in the field of collaborative and networked governance, this theory-building article aims to identify a number of governance factors conducive for the local co-creation of green transitions. The resulting theoretical framework allows us to conjecture about which governance factors will be critical in different socio-political contexts, thus facilitating future studies of contrasted governance paths to local green co-creation

Improving policy implementation through collaborative policymaking

We offer a fresh perspective on implementation problems by suggesting that collaborative policy design and adaptive policy implementation will help public policy makers to improve policy execution. Classical implementation theories have focused too narrowly on administrative stumbling blocks and New Public Management has reinforced the split between politics and administration. Attempts to improve policy implementation must begin by looking at policy design, which can be improved through collaboration and deliberation between upstream and downstream actors. We provide a broad overview of how collaborative policymaking and adaptive policy implementation might work in theory and practice.</jats:p

Robust governance in turbulent times

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