Year: 2010
Type: article
Abstract: That collaborative management has become the central reality of \npublic problem solving is nowhere better illustrated than in the field of \nenvironmental governance. Institutional innovations like collaborative \nenvironmental management or co-management have flourished and \nhave the leading paradigm for addressing complex environmental issues \nthroughout the world. South Africa has followed international trends with \nnew collaboratives emerging at regional or local level over the last decade. \nThese innovations are necessitated by the need for governments to find \nalternative ways to add to public value and adopt new roles to cope with \n‘the limits to governance’ which threaten to overwhelm public action. It \nis in this context that the trend towards decentralised units that are selfregulated \nand diverse, which can act locally and are freed from many of the \nstandardising constraints characteristic of hierarchical government, must \nbe viewed and in which public leaders act as brokers leveraging resources \nheld by third parties instead of controlling in-house resources. It is generally \naccepted that co-management entails a process and ultimately consensus building \namong all stakeholders as partners to develop relationships and \nknowledge which will enable them to generate sustainable solutions to new \nchallenges. This article reflects on the question of whether the involvement \nof new actors in public decision-making improves the outcomes by \ncreating shared responsibility, improving transparency, better targeting \ncollaborative resource management to community needs and ultimately \nadding to the creation of public value. The challenges of public leadership \nin these processes will be highlighted as one of the critical key success \nfactors in achieving these desired outcomes.
Author: Kobus Müller
Language: English
Subfield: Public Administration
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2123974869