Using bricolage and robustness theory to explain the dynamism of collaborative governance

Collaborative governance has developed into a well-established strand of public administration research. An impressive number of empirical studies document how collaborative governance processes can be relatively volatile, multi-vocal, distributed and heterogeneous. Hence, it is commonly observed that the actor composition changes over time, actors’ reasons for participating differ, the collaboration consists of multiple sub-projects, and there are many diverse outcomes. Bricolage theory and theories of robust governance provide insights that can make collaborative governance theory more attentive to such dynamics and draw a more nuanced picture of what enables actors to collaborate or prevent them from doing so. The contribution from bricolage theory and theories of robust governance is to recast collaboration as loosely coupled situated practices in which actors use what is available in terms of storylines, skills, tools and relationships to work together to produce different public-value outcomes. Based on these insights, we propose the study of collaborative governance as tangled moments of bricolage. We also provide some guidelines on how to conduct such studies and illustrate their usage with reference to a concrete case study of a collaborative governance process.