Interactive Governance: Where Next?

The last few decades have seen an intensification and diversification of interactive forms of governing. In a wide range of policy areas, elected politicians, civil servants, experts, private businesses, non-governmental organisations, individual citizens and other actors interact in the formulation and/or implementation of public policies. Interactive governance holds the promise of delivering more effective and innovative policies, though the existing literature suggests that a number of political conditions and factors may impede such objectives. At the most general level, the purpose of this section is to further our understanding of interactive governance in its diverse forms. More precisely, the section will explore and take stock of the potentials of interactive governing for increasing accountability, effectiveness, empowerment and innovation, and the institutional conditions and political forces that shape the realisation of such potentials. The section also aims at examining some of the dark sides of interactive governance, including its possible unintended (and at times undesirable) effects, and the diverse power relations at play in the many attempts to pursue interactive governance. The section would like to address these issues conceptually, methodologically and on the basis of empirical studies. The section may be seen as the further development of a previous section on Interactive policymaking, metagovernance and democracy held at the ECPR General Conference in Potsdam in 2009. The present section further develops the insights by that section in two ways, namely by including a number of new fields of interactive governance, namely accountability, conflict resolution, effectiveness (or performance) and innovation, and by trying to further develop our concepts and methodological tools for understanding and analysing these forms of governance.