Cross Collaborate

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Collaborative agreements often come together after seemingly endless sessions of hard negotiation. When reached, they may well represent a breakthrough achievement, finally getting long-time adversaries to agree on the toughest issues dividing them. After that triumph, though, implementation may require continuing collaborative work for years. While there are many examples of success, others produce disappointing [...]

Who controls collaboration? That might seem a contradiction in terms since the process itself requires joint decisions by the participants. But the issue of control doesn’t go away so easily. Several months into policy negotiations with a large collaborative group, I arrived at the last planning session for a critical meeting that was to take [...]

In the last ten years or so, collaborative governance has emerged as a term to fit the general idea of collaboration more specifically to the public policy field. Use of the term, though, is not that common. I still get a lot of blank stares when I use the phrase and even bemused cracks about [...]