Network Relations in Collaborative Governance and Their Role for Environmental Outcomes

Public participation and collaborative governance have often been advocated as a means to improve the acceptance of political decisions, to support processes of social learning, collective action and conflict resolution, and to reach better outputs and advance the sustainability standards of outputs. Participation or collaborative governance, on a basic level, can be considered as a reconfiguration of state-society relations, as compared to traditional hierarchical types of decision-making: These newer approaches stand for the inclusion of new and many different types of actors in the process of political decision-making, and with it, the building of new coalition structures and political cleavages. However, whereas there has been some theorizing on how given types of network structures would influence outputs of political decision-making and implementation processes, there is very little systematic empirical knowledge about the kinds of relational structures that evolve between state, civic and private actors, and how different archetypes of these network structures influence outputs. This paper sets out to compare how state-society(-business) relations are re-configured through public participation, and how different archetypes of network structures impact on political outputs. More specifically, it studies how different network archetypes are related to environmental standards of political decisions. Network archetypes are given by simple configurations among four types of actors, that is, government, citizens, civil society, and business actors. These types of actors are related to each other by either agreement or disagreement with respect to the issue in question. Data comes from a case survey meta-analysis of public environmental decision-making processes mostly across North America and Europe, which has been conducted as part of the European Research Council funded project ‘EDGE’. This unique database comprises 307 cases of (more or less) participatory environmental decision making, coded from case studies in the academic literature. When analyzing the main relation between network archetypes and outputs, we control for actors’ power resources, their representation in the process, and their influence on the outcome. We further take into account the environmental and institutional context, the participatory process design and actual implementation.