Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

In the past several decades, literature in social science has generated abundant discussions on collaborative governance for sustainability. Recently, scholarship in this stream has paid attention on the outcome of collaboration. However, most of these studies focus on the environmental aspect but rarely talk about social impacts of collaborative governance. To fill this theoretical gap, we design a conjoint choice experiment to explore whether multidimensional attributes of institutional design and performance information influence public judgement on a local collaborative sustainability program.

Discussion on citizens’ judgement, especially regarding their perception on collaborative governance is lacking. Traditional research on citizens’ public perception emphasize how citizens view the outcome effectiveness in government performance. However, performance measurement on environmental actions can be multifaceted. We assume that citizens’ judgement is a joint product of absolute and relative public program performances. Measurements of outcome on environmental efforts capture different social values such as equity and effectiveness (absolute performance), which are not always compatible in citizens eyes. Meanwhile, individuals’ perception would be affected by the social comparison effect, which we define it as the relative performance. Thus, it is reasonable to combine and compare effects between different performance presentations toward citizens.

Furthermore, do citizens only care about what the government has done, or are they also aware of legitimacy of the process? Previous literature has found that increasing civic participation in both project decision-making and implementation monitoring stages can garner public support, which means that holding the collaborative action accountable is important to build positive social impacts. Therefore, we hypothesize that a diverse stakeholder representation in environmental collaboration will increase citizens’ support, and an accountable implementation process will improve citizens’ perception. Overall, we assume that accountable institutions are as important as outcome performances in citizens’ evaluation.

To test varied explanatory powers of multiple factors in citizens’ evaluation, we will conduct a conjoint experiment on MTurk using an environmental collaboration case: solar panel installment in U.S. public school districts. The conjoint design will express a choice between multiple sets of two potential collaborative agreements. We ask our participants to assume themselves as residents of a hypothetical district and make choices. These agreements will involve attributes of both institution and performance factors, including stakeholder representation, implementation accountability, program effectiveness and equity, and performance comparison to neighbor districts. Finally, our experimental analysis will base on the average marginal component effects of each attribute separately and combine as a regression with all others.

This study is a preliminary attempt to examine citizens’ evaluation of collaborative governance. The contribution of our research is twofold: first, it compares the importance of different types of public information; second, it observes the multi-dimensions of collaborative governance in citizens eyes.