Collaborative approaches are increasingly common across a range of governance and policy areas. Single-issue, single-organization solutions often prove ineffective for complex, contentious, and diffuse problems. Collaborative efforts allow cross-jurisdictional governance and policy, involving groups that may operate on different decision-making levels. This book examines the full range of collaborative enterprises in natural resource management, urban planning, and environmental policy. The author explains the pros and cons of collaborative approaches, develops methods to test their effectiven ... More

Collaborative approaches are increasingly common across a range of governance and policy areas. Single-issue, single-organization solutions often prove ineffective for complex, contentious, and diffuse problems. Collaborative efforts allow cross-jurisdictional governance and policy, involving groups that may operate on different decision-making levels. This book examines the full range of collaborative enterprises in natural resource management, urban planning, and environmental policy. The author explains the pros and cons of collaborative approaches, develops methods to test their effectiveness, and identifies ways to improve their implementation and results. Drawing on extensive case studies of collaboration in the United States and Australia, he shows that collaboration is not just about developing a strategy but also about creating and sustaining arrangements which can support collaborative implementation. The book outlines a typology of collaborative efforts and a typology of networks to support implementation, and uses them to explain the factors that are likely to make collaborations successful, as well as examining the implications for participants. The case studies range from watershed management to transportation planning and include both successes and failures; they also offer lessons in collaboration that make the book suited for classroom use. Additionally, the book, which is designed to help practitioners evaluate and improve collaborative efforts at any phase, has a theoretical framework that provides scholars with a means to assess the effectiveness of collaboration and explain its ability to achieve results.