Understanding innovative regional collaboration : meta-governace and boundary objects as important mechanisms

Thanks to Elinor Ostrom and associates we know a lot about what kind of mechanisms are important for facilitating collaboration among rational actors, especially in cases of dealing with scare natural resources. Still, theoretical frameworks and criteria’s based on Rational Choice is not applicable on all cases of collective action and collaboration. Especially in cases of innovative collaboration, which are not problem-driven but goal-driven and when the interests of involved actors are not to be taken for granted, there is need for other theories. The proposed paper will empirically be based on two cases of collaborative innovations, which means that the collaborations in themselves were innovative and the outcome of the collaboration process also was innovative. The cases are interrelated as they took place in the same region (Göteborgsregionen). The first case is collaboration between civil servants from different public authorities and the outcome of the process was a strategy for doubling public transport in the urban region. The second case was a consultation process including almost all council politicians in all 13 municipalities in the urban region. This consultation was initiated by the GR and the outcome of the process was an agreement of a common vision for transport policy in the urban region (“strukturbilden”). In trying to understand why the collaboration was taken place and how it was possible for the collaborating actors to come up with innovative strategies three theoretical perspectives will be applied and further developed: meta-governance, micro-sociological dynamics and social learning, stemming from political science, ethnology and pedagogy. The first perspective will focus on steering strategies used by political and administrative leaders (cf. political framing and governing by proxy). The second perspective will be focused on participating actors sense-making and construction of projects and the third perspective will be focused on learning in dialogues. These three perspectives are seen as complementary, which means that the theoretical aim of the paper is to suggest a coherent theory for understanding and explaining similar kinds of collaborative innovations