Measuring Political Power in Collaborative Governance

• In Event: Collaborative and Polycentric Governance

Abstract

Research on collaborative governance is increasingly concerned with the dynamics of political power, including its definition, origins, and consequences. Collaborative governance is supposed to promote the capacity of participants to garner more resources, coordinate actions, and develop shared understandings about issues, ultimately resulting in more legitimate, informed, and effective policy outputs. However, actors vary in terms of their political power and capacity to participate, which has direct implications for the procedural and distribute equity of collaborative governance.

But what do we mean by political power in collaborative governance? Moreover, how do we measure political power to adequately capture different levels of actor engagement? This paper bridges concepts from collaborative governance and power literatures to present a typology of political power in collaborative governance that distinguishes between i) capacities to participate, ii) to deliberate, and iii) to structure conditions of participation. We apply this typology to a state-wide survey fielded from November 2018 to May 2019, to participants in California’s groundwater reform. Using this typology of political power as our dependent variable, we regress environmental (groundwater basin), institutional, and individual participants characteristics. Our findings shed light on the factors that facilitate more meaningful actor engagement, beyond mere representation (i.e., capacity to participate).

Improving how we measure political power and analyzing its distribution helps advance equitable and meaningful actor engagement in collaborative governance. Moreover, facilitating meaningful engagement from diverse actors, especially from civil-society groups, minimizes democratic deficits associated with elite driven decision-making that reinforce existing power asymmetries among actors.

Authors

• Linda Esteli Mendez-Barrientos, University of Denver

• Mark Lubell, University of California, Davis