Salon Seminar Series: Collaboration Has an Audience

Please join the Center for Policy Design and Governance (CPDG) at Syracuse University in welcoming Jack Mewhirter, a visiting scholar from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Light refreshments will be served.

Presenter 

Jack Mewhirter (University of Tennessee, Knoxville)

Title

Collaboration Has an Audience: How Collaborative Design Choices Shape Public Trust and Coproductive Capacity in Policy Subsystems

Abstract

Collaboration is a widely employed strategy for addressing “wicked” policy problems. While scholars have long recognized that collaborative features, including the diversification of associated members, can shape collaborative outputs and outcomes, how the affected public perceives and reacts to these choices is left largely unexamined.

This talk considers how and to what extent collaborative membership—specifically, the extent to which memberships include civil-society groups that directly advocate for local citizens—impacts public trust in, and willingness to coproduce with, the agencies that convene them.

Leveraging observational and experimental evidence within two policy domains inherently subject to issue and jurisdictional interdependence that foster collaboration (environmental and policing policy arenas), the evidence indicates that agencies which engage civil-society groups in collaborative proceedings earn public credit, in both trust and willingness to coproduce, while those that exclude them incur penalties on both counts. Even modest citizen-stakeholder influence outperforms no collaboration at all, though returns are better realized as civil-society influence rises. 

Together, that evidence positions the public as a consequential, and largely unmodeled, actor in collaborative systems.