A few weeks ago, November 8-12th, I had the opportunity to go to the lovely city of Oaxaca, Mexico for a conference with the Programme on Ecosystem Change and Society (PECS).
On the 11th, with my wonderful friend and colleague Georgina Cundill, we led a workshop on collaboration. Our goal was to work towards a typology of how the critical components of successful collaborations changes across diverse contexts. There have been a number of excellent review articles on what makes for a successful collaboration (see references at the bottom for a smattering of citations). However, we were interested in how the success factors noted in the literature change under diverse conditions.
We spent some time going over the aggregated list of success factors which will come out soon as a practitioners’ brief. The brief will elaborate on this blog post to provide guidance for practitioners trying to build collaborative projects in the field. We then tried to identify how context-dependent these factors are. We are currently exploring cases to look at how different collaboration is whether top-down or bottom-up in origination, whether well-funded or on shoestring budgets, whether legally mandated or organically formed, and other similar contexts.
In the near future, we will have the practitioners’ brief available online. The workshop benefitted from having a number of practitioners in attendance to provide real world expertise. We will follow this with more detailed academic findings. Stay tuned!
References (among many others):
Ansell, C., & Gash, A. (2008). Collaborative governance in theory and practice. Journal of public administration research and theory, 18(4), 543-571.
Armitage, D. R., Plummer, R., Berkes, F., Arthur, R. I., Charles, A. T., Davidson-Hunt, I. J., … & Wollenberg, E. K. (2009). Adaptive co-management for social-ecological complexity. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 7(2), 95-102.
Folke, C., T. Hahn, P. Olsson, and J. Norberg. (2005). Adaptive governance of social-ecological systems. Annual Review of Environment and Resources 30, 441-473.
Plummer, R., Crona, B., Armitage, D. R., Olsson, P., Tengö, M., & Yudina, O. (2012). Adaptive comanagement: a systematic review and analysis. Ecology and Society, 17(3), 11.
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