Essays on Government-led Collaborative Governance

Abstract

Governments increasingly use collaborative governance as a strategy for policymaking and management. This dissertation is a collection of three essays each addressing an important question regarding government-led collaborative governance. Social Security Consultative Bodies (SSCBs) in South Korea—a case of government-mandated collaborative governance—constitute the empirical context of the essays. The first essay explores whether governments serving as collaborative platforms can breed trust using repeated measures survey data. Findings show that as a result of participating in government-led collaborative governance, SSCB participants report an increase in both institutional and individual-level trust. The study confirms that governments serving as collaborative platforms can initiate genuine collaboration as evidenced by enhanced trust and identifies factors that government platforms can leverage to facilitate trust building at different levels. The second essay explores the policy feedback effects of government-led collaborative governance. The central question is whether government-created venues crowd out or reinforce participation in alternative participatory venues. A mixed-methods analysis using both survey and interview data uncovers that government-led collaborative governance generates both resource effects and interpretive effects which promotes further civic engagement. The findings imply that government-created collaborative venues generate cooperative feedback effects that reinforce other participatory venues. The final essay focuses on the co-production function of SSCBs. I explore what implications service delivery through government-led collaborative governance has for place-based inequities in access to public services. Using survey data, I find that internal process dynamics are associated with co-production performance in delivering public services, rather than local resource capacities. This implies successful management of government-led collaborative governance can mitigate place-based inequities that arise due to local resource disparities. Collectively, the essays advance our knowledge of a particular type of collaborative governance that is government-led while making both theoretical and methodological contributions to the study of public management.