Convening for Consensus: Simulating Stakeholder Agreement in Collaborative Governance Processes Under Different Network Conditions
Authored by Tyler A Scott, Craig W Thomas, Jose Manuel Magallanes
Date Published: 2019
DOI: 10.1093/jopart/muy053
Sponsors:
No sponsors listed
Platforms:
R
Model Documentation:
Other Narrative
Model Code URLs:
Model code not found
Abstract
Public policymakers and managers use collaborative governance processes
strategically to involve relevant stakeholders in developing plans,
designing programs, and implementing policies. Although intuitive and
normatively popular, such deliberative processes pose a tension between
the prospective benefits of broader involvement (both instrumental
benefits such as information and support for implementation and
normative benefits related to representation) and the challenges of
reaching agreements amongst disparate stakeholders. This paper builds
upon empirical studies of complex policy networks to explore what
happens when a public official initiates a collaborative governance
process within a policy network. We use agent-based modeling (ABM) to
simulate the impact of process attributes, such as how many people are
involved, how invitees are selected, and the presence of difficult
participants, within different network contexts, including network size,
policy uncertainty, and preference distributions. This simulation-based
approach does not rely upon survey instruments or subjective responses,
and thereby complements existing empirical studies of collaborative
governance. ABM provides a platform to explore the implications of key
network assumptions, test different initiation strategies, model
emergent properties resulting from inter-actor deliberation, and
simulate long-run outcomes. Our results show how network and system
conditions modulate the impact of group convening and design strategies.
More generally, we demonstrate how ABM can be used to examine potential
collaborative governance outputs under different design choices and
network contexts when large data sets are unavailable.
Tags
Social networks
Cooperation
Performance
coordination
Institutions
ecology
Top-down
Implementation
Public-participation
Policy networks