How Does Collaborative Governance Scale?

Current trends towards collaborative governance aim at giving people more say in the policies that shape their lives. But one crucial question about collaborative governance that has been all but ignored is how it can, or can’t, work at different scales? This book takes up that question, exploring the challenges of operating at a single scale, across multiple scales, and moving between scales. The book explores the overlooked role of scale and scaling in a wide range of policy areas, including employment policy, water management, transportation planning, public health, university governance, artistic markets, child welfare, and humanitarian relief. It presents case studies from around the world, and from the local to the global.

Chris Ansell works in the Department of Political Science at University of California, Berkeley. Professor Jacob Torfing is in the Department of Social Sciences and Business at Roskilde University.