Abstract Environmental governance challenges often span geographic and sectoral boundaries, requiring collaboration between diverse stakeholders and multilateral decision making. To facilitate such efforts, policymakers and public managers create and support platforms that provide a structured framework for promoting collaborative governance. As the collaborative platform model is often centrally initiated – e.g., when state or national actors create a system of local collaborative resource management platforms – cross-case comparison is particularly important for understanding how a common design leads to variance in procedures and outputs in local contexts. Many collaborative platforms leave a “paper trail” of documents such as meeting records and plans. This analysis compares 10 identically designed and simultaneously initiated regional water planning platforms in the State of Georgia. Drawing on 106 meeting reports, we apply topic modeling to these meeting documents to generate replicable and scalable measures of how participant actions and interest representation unfold over time. Specifically, we measure topical focus on water planning issues over time, and compare these process-phase measures between councils and against the content of the resulting plan developed by each planning council. While existing literature has focused on how institutional design features such as representation and decision-rules shape procedural outcomes and outputs, we observe considerable variation in procedural behavior and plan outputs despite the fact that all 10 platforms share a common design. The consulting firm selected to direct each local platform is shown to be associated with both the topical focus of each regions’ planning discussion and the BMPs selected in regional plans. This comports with recent evidence pointing to the important – and largely overlooked – role that technical consultants play in environmental governance and regulatory processes.

中文翻译：

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共同的制度设计，不同的结果：区域水资源规划协同治理平台的比较案例研究

摘要 环境治理挑战通常跨越地理和部门界限，需要不同利益相关者和多边决策之间的合作。为促进此类努力，政策制定者和公共管理者创建并支持平台，为促进协作治理提供结构化框架。由于协作平台模型通常是集中启动的——例如，当州或国家行为者创建一个本地协作资源管理平台系统时——跨案例比较对于理解共同设计如何导致程序和输出在本地环境中的差异尤为重要. 许多协作平台都会留下诸如会议记录和计划等文件的“书面记录”。该分析比较了乔治亚州 10 个设计相同且同时启动的区域水资源规划平台。利用 106 份会议报告，我们将主题建模应用于这些会议文件，以生成可复制和可扩展的衡量标准，衡量参与者的行为和兴趣表现如何随时间展开。具体来说，我们衡量随着时间的推移对水资源规划问题的关注，并将这些过程阶段的措施在委员会之间进行比较，并与每个规划委员会制定的最终计划的内容进行比较。虽然现有文献侧重于制度设计特征（如代表性和决策规则）如何塑造程序结果和输出，但我们观察到程序行为和计划输出的相当大的差异，尽管所有 10 个平台共享一个共同的设计。被选为指导每个本地平台的咨询公司被证明与每个地区规划讨论的主题焦点和地区计划中选择的 BMP 相关。这与最近的证据相符，这些证据表明技术顾问在环境治理和监管过程中发挥的重要作用——但在很大程度上被忽视了——。