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Innovation and Agreement? Tensions among the Outputs of Collaborative Governance

Collaborative governance seeks to achieve results that are difficult to achieve using more traditional public policy tools or political processes. It has the potential to address policy problems that transcend the authority or capability of individual agencies or legislative bodies, or to resolve conflicts among stake holders divided by organizational boundaries, distrust, or competing frames of reference. Successful collaborations redress both types of challenges by producing innovative policy solutions and political agreements on those solutions.Producing both innovations that address pressing policy challenges and agreement among divided stake holders is a tall order. Innovation benefits from a diversity of perspectives and ideas, along with robust, probing exchanges among the adherents of those perspectives and ideas. Political agreements, by contrast, benefit from homogeneous perspectives and shared interests. Key factors that enable innovation therefore complicate attempts to achieve political agreement, and many factors that enable agreement may make innovation less likely.Because some of the factors that enable innovation and agreement among collaboration partners differ and may undermine one another, producing both innovation and agreement is even more challenging than producing either one in the absence of the other. This paper reviews the literatures on collaboration, multi-party conflict resolution, and advocacy coalitions to identify factors that enable collaborative governance to generate either innovation or agreement – or both at the same time. The literature review pinpoints tensions between the characteristics of collaborative governance that produce policy innovation and those that produce political agreement. The paper goes on to identify key variables – including drivers, institutions, and processes – for studying how those tensions affect the production of different types of innovation and agreement by collaborative governance initiatives. Research propositions follow regarding the factors that enable collaborative governance initiatives to produce innovations, agreements, both, or neither. Studies that use the variables to investigate the propositions can improve understanding of the factors that enable collaborative governance initiatives to manage the tensions between innovation and agreement.