Producing Agreements and Innovations in Collaborative Governance

Collaborative governance initiatives often seek innovative solutions to longstanding policy dilemmas, as well as agreements on those solutions among longtime political adversaries. Producing both innovations and agreements in combination is difficult: the diversity among collaborators that enable innovations can complicate their attempts to reach agreements, while unifying factors that support agreements may diminish the prospects for innovation. This article introduces three phases of collaborative agreement and pinpoints drivers of agreements on collaborative innovations. We analyze how each driver connects to the cross-pressure between unity and diversity in collaborative governance and generate propositions that relate each driver to the production of different phases of agreements. Our propositions indicate that collaborators seeking agreements on innovations must strike a balance between factors that support innovations (but may hinder agreements) and factors that support agreements (but may hinder innovations). We recommend ways practitioners can foster and sustain that balance by varying rules governing collaborative participation, information discovery, deliberation, and decisions. We conclude by proposing new research using our conceptual refinements to study whether specific conditions surrounding collaboration are associated with the achievement of different phases of agreement on collaborative innovations.