Strengthening Interactive Political Leadership by Designing Arenas for Collaborative Policy Innovation: Theoretical Reflections and Empirical Experiences

The exercise of interactive political leadership is predicated on the design of new institutional arenas that facilitate collaborative policy innovation. In order to explore how to design such arenas, and to evaluate their impact on the policy innovation capacity of elected politicians, this paper studies the recent and on-going attempt of Gentofte Municipality to transform its political governance system. In 2015, the local council embarked on an ambitious reform of its political committee system that amongst other things created a new type of task committees in which the councillors are developing new policy solutions together with local citizens and stakeholders. The reform is currently the source of inspiration of similar reforms in other municipalities, and critical evaluation of the results is therefore required. The case study draws on a combination of document studies, participant observation, qualitative interviews and survey data. The main finding is that while the new task committees are successful in spurring collaborative policy innovation, it has proved difficult to forge a connection between the new interactive policy making arenas and the old political institutions in terms of the standing committees and the Council. The paper proceeds as follows. The first section explains why we need a concept of interactive political leadership. The second section defines the concept of interactive political leadership and shows how it can help to bridge the gulf between political leadership theory and theories of interactive governance. The third section discusses the role of institutional design in facilitating the exercise of interactive political leadership. The fourth section introduces and contextualizes the empirical case study and describes the data material. The fifth section presents the results of the empirical analysis. The sixth section discusses the lessons that can be drawn from the case study and the conclusion summarizes the results and suggests some future research avenues.