By Laurel Saiz

A rural province of the Philippines slashes its poverty rate from 52 to 4.2 percent in only 12 years. Citizens are included in decision making about development plans and budgets, and indigenous peoples are welcomed as partners in the management of their forests and watershed. A variety of public, private, and nongovernmental organizations come together to start day-care centers.

Sherman County, Oregon, builds a 24-megawatt wind farm, nestled amid numerous winter wheat farms. The sites were selected through a consensus-based process with diverse local leaders and citizens.

The State of Wisconsin assures the long-term survival of the endangered Karner blue butterfly, which is dependent on the wild lupine plant across its habitat range. Representatives from utilities, the forest product industry, governments at every level, and environmentalists develop the habitat plan.

These successful initiatives—domestic and international, large and seemingly small—are examples of effective collaborative governance, a larger, umbrella term for collaborative public management and participatory governance. It’s a field undergoing an explosion of new developments with broad implications.

Last fall, leaders in collaborative governance gathered in Washington, D.C., for a three-day conference that served as the kick-off for PARC’s new “Collaborative Governance Initiative.” Being launched during PARC’s 20th anniversary year, the effort promotes new knowledge and understanding about collaborative public management, deliberative democracy, and civic engagement. Papers from the conference are being published in book form by Georgetown University Press and in special issues of the Public Administration Review (PAR) and the International Public Management Journal.

In their introduction to the PAR issue, PARC co-directors Rosemary O’Leary and Catherine Gerard, and Lisa Blomgren Bingham (a PARC honorary senior research fellow and faculty member at Indiana University) define collaborative public management as “facilitating and operating in multiorganizational arrangements to solve problems that cannot be solved or easily solved by single organizations.” When public organizations and public officials are involved, it often encompasses “the active involve­ ment of citizens in government decision making.”

“The whole philosophy,” O’Leary says, “is that the individuals at the table—the stakeholders—are the experts in terms of the solution. We are experts at process. It’s not for us to impress a solution on them. With an emphasis on collaborative public management and participatory governance, you can’t say that life will always be great and you’ll have no more conflicts, but it often is a giant step toward an enduring resolution to the conflict.”