Collaborative governance in theory and practice

Over the last two decades, a new strategy of governing called "collaborative governance" has developed. This mode of governance brings multiple stakeholders together in common forums with public agencies to engage in consensus-oriented decision making. In this article, we conduct a meta-analytical study of the existing literature on collaborative governance with the goal of elaborating a general model of collaborative governance. The ultimate goal is to develop a contingency approach to collaboration that can highlight conditions under which collaborative governance will be more or less effective as an approach to policy making and public management. (1) In conducting this meta-analytic study, we adopted a strategy we call "successive approximation"