Collaborative Governance: Emerging Practices and the Incomplete Legal Framework for Public and Stakeholder Voice

This article describes the broad range of processes through which citizens and stakeholders collaborate to make, implement, and enforce public policy. First, it briefly reviews collaborative and new governance. Second, it describes deliberative democracy; collaborative public or network management; and appropriate dispute resolution in the policy process. These three separate fields are part of a single phenomenon, namely the changing nature of citizen and stakeholder voice in governance. Third, it describes how these new forms of participation operate across the policy continuum. Fourth, it briefly reviews existing legal infrastructure for collaborative governance primarily from the perspective of federal administrative law. I conclude that we need to revise our legal infrastructure to facilitate collaboration in a way that will strengthen our democracy