Collaborative Policy Innovation: Problems and Potential

Governments all over the Western world currently face wicked problems that call for policy innovation. A new strand of research in public innovation points to collaboration between public authorities and relevant and affected stakeholders as an important driver of public innovation. A case study of collaborative policy innovation in the area of mental health care in Denmark indicates that collaboration can contribute to qualify the politicians’ understanding of wicked policy problems, and to fostering new creative policy solutions. The study also shows, however, that the new problem understandings and policy ideas produced in collaborative governance arenas are not diffused to the formal political institutions of representative democracy because the participating politicians only to a limited extent function as boundary spanners between the collaborative governance arena and the decision making arenas in representative democracy.