Self-organization and Responsiveness: A Simulation of Collaborative Governance

A key issue in the literature on collaborative governance has been the question of how to ensure the responsiveness of the system to the general public interest as well as to specific underrepresented interests. In particular, it is unclear whether or not the self-organizing nature of collaborative governance can serve to enhance the responsiveness of the system. This paper investigated two aspects of responsiveness – global and local – in the context of a self-organizing collaborative governance system by developing a computational model of collaborative governance that focuses on information sharing and coalition formation. Using agent-based modeling, this study generated collaborative governance systems among artificial actors that represented specific constituents and acted according to their goals and their tendency toward collaboration. Mixed results regarding the trade-off between global and local responsiveness were found through the simulation. On average, collaborative actors achieved higher global responsiveness and lower local responsiveness than non-collaborative actors. Furthermore, collaborative actors could better reconcile global and local responsiveness over time. Noncollaborative actors that pursued improvement in local responsiveness ironically ended up enhancing global responsiveness. Actors that pursued improvement in both global and local responsiveness were least successful in achieving their goals. Based on the results of the simulation, six propositions regarding responsiveness in self-organizing collaborative governance systems are proposed.