Eric Coleman, Ph.D., the Henderson Professor of Political Science at Florida State University and Bill Schultz, Ph.D., Associate Scholar of Political Science at Florida State University, co-authored an article titled, “How Communities Benefit from Collaborative Governance: Experimental Evidence in Ugandan Oil and Gas.” The article was published in the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory alongside A. Rani Parker, Jacob Manyindo, and Emmanuel M. Mukuru. Below is a summary of the article written by doctoral student Martin Gandur (Ph.D. Political Science’ 25).
Research on collaborative governance (CG) highlights that power imbalances between communities and other participants can undermine the benefits of collaboration for some communities. Thus, mitigating power imbalances can improve community benefits from collaboration in many ways.
In this article, Eric Coleman, Ph.D., Bill Schultz, Ph.D., and co-authors study an attempt to mitigate power imbalances by examining community benefits that result from interactions with different civic, private, and public decision-makers in Uganda. The results indicate that encouraging the equitable participation of communities improves collaboration with other actors.
Furthermore, the evidence presented by Dr. Coleman et. al. suggests that interventions mindful of community needs can improve CG and shows how such communities can be most effectively targeted.
Their research makes important contributions to the literature on CG. Their experimental data allow the researchers to quantify the impact of community participation on collaboration between people living in those communities. In turn, this helps answer the important policy question of whether, by how much, and with whom, collaboration improves when communities participate.
Moreover, since the researcher’s study collaboration was relational between the people living in the area and various key decision-makers in the policy process (the private sector, civil society organizations, local and central government), this community-centered approach to study community participation helps the researchers to examine how effective such policies are for those most vulnerable, and to assess which decision-makers collaborate with local people.
Studies from different disciplines recognize that complex policy problems require the collaboration and coordination of multiple actors working across institutions at different scales. The authors refer to these complex arrangements as CG. In these contexts of CG, however, research shows that local people often face power imbalances. While policy decision-makers are increasingly attempting to mitigate such imbalances to improve outcomes for communities, there is little experimental evidence that studies the impact of efforts to mitigate power imbalances.
The article by Dr. Coleman et. al. studies the impacts of an experimental intervention in Uganda that promotes inclusive community participation in oil and gas extractives planning. Specifically, the researchers examine whether the intervention improves the responsiveness of civil society organizations, the private sector, and government actors to community needs.
The researchers collect and analyze data from a field experiment in western Uganda that randomly assigns some communities to participate in “multi-stakeholder forums” (a type of stakeholder engagement intervention). These forums support balanced community collaboration with other actors by bringing representatives of each community together with representatives of various public and private oil-sector decision-makers to discuss the oil-sector and local policy concerns. The experiment took place across 107 villages and collected data from 6,062 households.
The intervention designed by the researchers is villages’ participation in the multi-stakeholder forums organized by a Ugandan not-for-profit organization, Maendeleo ya Jamii. Half of the villages participated in these forums while the other half did not. The researcher’s statistical analysis focuses on whether different policy actors engage, and effectively collaborate, with people from the participating communities to a greater extent than those in the communities that did not participate in the forums.
The authors suggest that more research is needed to understand the role of different government actors in different macro-institutional contexts. Moreover, future studies should examine whether the impacts described in this article can be sustained over time.
To read the full research report, click here. To learn more about the FSU Department of Political Science, visit coss.fsu.edu/polisci
APA Citation:
Eric A Coleman, Bill Schultz, A Rani Parker, Jacob Manyindo, Emmanuel M Mukuru, How Communities Benefit from Collaborative Governance: Experimental Evidence in Ugandan Oil and Gas, Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, Volume 33, Issue 4, October 2023, Pages 616–632, https://doi.org/10.1093/jopart/muac050