Collaborative governance

Governance is a broader concept than government and also includes the roles played by the community sector and the private sector in managing and planning countries, regions and cities.Collaborative Governance involves the government, community and private sectors communicating with each other and working together to achieve more than any one sector could achieve on its own. Ansell and Gash (2008) have explored the conditions required for effective collaborative governance. They say “The ultimate goal is to develop a contingency approach of collaboration that can highlight conditions under which collaborative governance will be more or less effective as an approach to policy making and public management” Collaborative governance covers both the informal and formal relationships in problem solving and decision-making. Conventional government policy processes can be embedded in wider policy processes by facilitating collaboration between the public, private and community sectors. Collaborative Governance requires three things, namely: support; leadership; and a forum. The support identifies the policy problem to be fixed. The leadership gathers the sectors into a forum. Then, the members of the forum collaborate to develop policies, solutions and answers.

There are many different forms of collaborative governance as such as Consensus Building and a Collaborative Network:

Over the past two decades new collaborative approaches to governing and managing have developed in a range of fields, including: urban and regional planning; public administration and law; natural resource management; and environmental management. Collaborative governance has emerged as a response to the failures of government policy implementation and to the high cost and politicization of regulation and as an alternative to manageralism and adversarial approaches. The field of public administration has changed its focus from bureaucracy to that of collaboration in the context of the network society. Public administrators have blurred the lines between the people, the private sector and the government. Although bureaucracies still remain, public administrators have begun to recognize that more can potentially be achieved by collaboration and networking. Collaboration and partnerships are nothing new in the political realm, however the wider use of this leadership style has gained momentum in recent years. In part, this is a response to neoliberalism with its focus on the primacy of the free-market economy and the private sector..

Ansell and Gash (2008) define collaborative governance as follows:

'A governing arrangement where one or more public agencies directly engage non-state stakeholders in a collective decision-making process that is formal, consensus-oriented, and deliberative and that aims to make or implement public policy or manage public programs or assets'.

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