ABSTRACT

Research finds that productive interfaces between collaborative and bureaucratic forms of governance hinges on the extent to which public managers act as competent boundary spanners who process information, accommodate communication and align and coordinate behavior, and it seems likely that politicians have an equally important role to play in aligning processes and arenas of collaborative governance with representative democracy. The empirical forms that political boundary making takes are examined in a study of 28 cases of local, regional or national level policy-making in nine Western countries. This study indicates that there is considerable variation in the way politicians perform political boundary spanning particularly with respect to their degree of engagement in collaborative policymaking arenas and the focus of their boundary-spanning activities. Furthermore, the study shows that collaborative governance tends to go best in tandem with representative democracy in those cases where politicians perform both hands off and hands on boundary-spanning activities.

摘要

研究发现，协作式和官僚式的治理形式之间的生产性接口取决于公共管理人员充当胜任的边界扳手的程度，他们负责处理信息，容纳交流以及调整和协调行为，而且政治人物似乎也可以发挥同样重要的作用在使协作治理的过程和领域与代议制民主保持一致。在对9个西方国家的28个地方，地区或国家级决策案例进行研究的过程中，研究了政治边界制定的经验形式。这项研究表明，政治家执行政治跨越边界的方式存在很大差异，特别是在他们参与合作决策领域的程度以及其跨越边界活动的重点方面。此外，研究表明，在政治家既执行交接又进行跨边界活动的情况下，协作式治理往往与代议制民主一起发展得最好。