Unpacking the Collaborative Toolbox: Why and When Do Public Managers Choose Collaborative Governance Strategies?

The public policy and public management literatures together support a vibrant discussion of collaborative governance. Much of this scholarship takes a broad perspective focusing on questions such as what collaborative governance is; why collaborative governance emerges; or why individuals and organizations choose to participate in voluntary, nonbinding collaborative efforts. This paper focuses specifically on the role of public managers as leaders, encouragers, and followers of collaborative governance. We examine the decision calculus factoring into the choice of collaborative governance as a toolbox for achieving desired policy goals. That is, we ask why public managers choose to devote public resources to collaborative governance. What motivates public managers to pick up the phone, write a check, or otherwise change their current behavior? We develop 20 propositions that contextualize this choice in terms of two overarching questions: (i) How do institutional structure and organizational strategy intersect to influence the ways in which public managers design and implement collaborative governance?; and (ii) Why do public managers choose particular roles within collaborative institutions? In doing so, we demonstrate how the public policy and public management literatures can be coupled to better understand a theoretical issue that each research body struggles to encapsulate in isolation.