Collaborative Governance: Between Invited and Invented Spaces

Ansell and Gash’s (2008) definition of collaborative governance, which they developed following a meta-analysis of 137 articles in the existing literature, remains widely accepted. Over a decade on, however, there has been much innovation in the field, increasingly incorporating both digital and face-to-face spaces. Hybrid processes are created between invited and invented spaces of citizenship (Cornwall 2009), which aim to move beyond formal and clearly defined forums of collaboration towards a more organic dialogue that happens simultaneously online and offline and at different levels of government, opening up new spaces where citizens can reimagine their role vis-à-vis institutions and create a participatory ecology embedded in the community. This paper attempts to update Ansell and Gash’s definition of collaborative governance in light of these innovations and borrows from the existing literature to build a framework of collaborative governance. We use this framework to analyse three UK case studies to trace recent developments in democratic innovations: NHS Citizen, an attempt to develop a deliberative system within the NHS; co-production of knowledge between residents and institutions in Whitley, South Reading; and Participatory City, a new model of coproduction of outcomes, where the intent is to lower the barriers to participation through flexible opportunities for microparticipation. These new spaces of collaboration inevitably engender conflicts and complex accountability dynamics, as they challenge more traditional and defined forms of collaboration between institutions and citizens.