How does collaborative governance scale?

Although hierarchies and markets continue to play a crucial role in regulating society and the economy and delivering public and private services, collaborative forms of governance are proliferating, fuelled by institutional complexity and political fragmentation and driven by the recognition that no single actor has the knowledge or resources to solve complex societal problems (Kooiman, 1993; 2003). A growing number of studies analyse how collaboration provides learning-based mechanisms for solving ill-defined and hard-to-solve problems and for constructively managing differences (Gray, 1989; Roberts, 2000).