| Popis: |
Increasingly, the practice of governance depends on multi-stakeholder engagement and collaboration. Such collaborative governance arrangements are not only increasingly necessary for public sector institutions to create effective policy, but can also facilitate democratic engagement by involving a wider range of participants in the policy making process. These motivations are equally true in rural places, which face significant social, economic, and environmental challenges. Despite the growing importance of collaborative governance overall and its applicability in rural places, no research has rigorously investigated the practice of collaborative governance as it is applied in rural communities. This dissertation focuses on answering a foundational question; how do rural communities enact collaborative governance? I explore the question in the context of food and agriculture system policy through a study of two examples of collaborative governance; the Local Foods Coalition in the San Luis Valley of Colorado and the Ag Success Team in Wayne County, Ohio. Employing an interpretive methodology guided by methodological localism, I explore the social ecosystem context of these two cases of collaboration, how members came to participate in each group, and the nature of their collaborative work. Findings from these cases suggest that, while extant frameworks of collaborative governance are applicable to collaborative governance in rural settings, four key observations require further investigation and consideration, not only for our understanding of rural collaborative governance, but potentially collaborative governance in other settings as well. First, people in these rural communities wore “multiple hats” (i.e. had many different roles), which complicated engagement. Second, stakeholder engagement for collaboration depended on largely informal personal relationships rather than institutional partnerships. Regardless of intention, resulting engagement efforts tended to remain within the existing social networks of those already involved resulting in “core groups.” Third, this research highlighted the role that normative motivations for collaboration play in structuring who was considered relevant to a group’s stakeholder engagement efforts. The combination of a group’s motivations for collaboration and their way of knowing influenced what people existing members saw as legitimate stakeholders to try to engage in the first place. Finally, a central theme in this research was the importance of place, not only as a context but as an entity with which local participants described an important relationship that, as a result, provided a motivation for the group’s sense of interdependence. The importance of place encourages a more robust conceptual understanding of that concept as a relational participant in social process rather than just as a contextual setting. On this basis, I conclude with an argument for public administration scholarship to engage with critical place inquiry and a discussion of the implications of such an argument for both the study of collaborative governance and the broader discipline of public administration. |
