Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Collaborative governance is increasingly dominant in the United States. In collaborative governance, actors come together to solve wicked problems, or problems without readily available outcomes that require the efforts of multiple actors, often across sectors. While collaborative governance is widely studied, formal analysis of collaborative governance arrangements often treat arrangements as if they exist in a vacuum. In reality, actors may participate in multiple collaborative governance arrangements thereby creating connections among collaborative governance arrangements. Understanding the nature of these connections may shed light on individual actor behavior.

In this paper, I examine overlapping collaborative governance arrangements. I treat these overlapping arrangements as an ecology of games (Long 1957) where actors, issues, and collaborative venues intersect to form a distinct set of games within a community. I use affiliation network methods to develop measures of collaboration within and across these collaborative governance arrangements. Affiliation networks are multi-mode networks where there are two more distinct entities called modes (e.g., actors, issues, venues). Affiliation network methods can be used to understand actor participation within and across games. While we can observe these trends qualitatively or within single networks, treating games as overlapping affiliation networks allows us to create an index and rank centrality of actors, issues, and venues. Analyzing data in a more systematic way lends additional insights about individual actor behavior and simultaneous patterns of interactions among modes.

Measures developed from affiliation networks can be used to understand how strategies and action in particular games are shaped by the larger structure of games in the community. For example, in an ecosystem with games related to hunger, poverty, and health, actors may participate in multiple games and strategies that seem irrational in one context may be explained by their participation in multiple games. Affiliation network measures may also be used to identify redundancy, inefficiency, or structural weaknesses in systems. They are useful for policy makers and organizational leaders to understand how multiple collaborative governance systems operate in the same geographical area or policy area. I apply these measures to collaborative arrangements to solve wicked problems in a midsized American city to illustrate their utility. I also discuss the utility of these measures in other settings including federal and international arenas.

This is primarily a conceptual paper. The major contribution of this paper is to conceptualize collaborative governance as a series of overlapping games and to develop measures to systematically examine these overlaps and their effects on individual actor behavior.

References

Long, N. (1958). The Local Community as an Ecology of Games. American Journal of Sociology, 64(3), 251-261.