Abstract Collaborative arrangements have become popular in contemporary public policy and administration, particularly in the domain of social policy. Drawing on five articles spanning four countries, our symposium examines the design and performance of collaborative governance when we move from ideal conditions into specific, often demanding, real-world contexts. This preface introduces three tensions that confront collaborative governance arrangement in social policy. First, when enabling conditions are weak or actively hostile, collaborative governance does not simply fail and instead, persists through other means like ‘street-level partnerships’. Second, when politics enter the picture, it can both undermine and sustain collaboration, depending on the nature of contestations. Third, theories of collaborative governance that are built disproportionately on cases from stable advanced democracies are translatable to Global South and post-socialist environments if they are attendant to the bottom-up processes that permits collaboration to emerge. This symposium sheds light on the relationship between formal institutional design and the everyday relational work through which practitioners in various contexts keep collaborative arrangements alive. It hopes to inspire future research on the costs of failed collaborative governance and the role of civil society beyond the service delivery partner they are traditionally thought to perform.
Saguin et al. (Mon,) studied this question.