How does collaborative governance scale?

Abstract

Scale is an overlooked issue in the literature on interactive governance. This special issue investigates the challenges posed by the scale and scaling of network and collaborative forms of governance. Our original motivation arose from a concern about whether collaborative governance can scale up. As we learned more, our inquiry expanded to include the tensions inherent in collaboration across scales or at multiple scales and the issue of dynamically scaling collaboration to adapt to changing problems and demands. The diverse cases in this special issue explore these challenges in a range of concrete empirical domains than span the globe.