Assessing Outputs, Outcomes, and Barriers in Collaborative Water Governance: A Case Study

Numerous experiments in the collaborative governance of natural resources, particularly water resources, have emerged rapidly since the 1990s (Kenney et al. 2000), leading some scholars to characterize the 21st century as “the era of the collaborative state ” (Koontz and Thomas 2006, 111). Broadly, collaborative governance processes bring together a wide variety of stakeholders in a decision-making context to “carry out a public purpose that could not otherwise by accomplished ” (Emerson, Nabatchi, and Balog 2012, 2). These processes often include various governmental and public stakeholders, repeated face-to-face discussions among participants, and a mission to build consensus, typically within a new, locally-scaled forum initiated by a public agency (Ansell and Gash 2008)