Back to the future? Collaborative environmental governance theory and practice

This chapter draws on the American context to review the evolution of collaboration in environmental governance over time. It examines the origins of ecosystem management, its focus on a holistic, interdisciplinary approach, and its gradual expansion to address social concerns and stakeholder and organizational roles. It also traces the early origins in community-based collaborative environmental management. With origins in Elinor Ostrom’s work on self-governance in response to the failures of centralized government control, collaborative partnerships emerged to fill important gaps and voids. The early scholarship in this realm focused on the failures of top-down practice and best practices and the second generation scholarship began to propose typologies, models, and taking a more critical examination of outcomes. Finally, the chapter examines the research on collaborative public management in response to reduced government roles, resulting in more networked forms of governance. The comparison of these fields and their evolution over time reveals some important common themes and differences, and the tensions between theory and practice.