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This article provides a framework for assessing the democratic merits of collaborative public management in terms of seven normative ideals: inclusiveness, representativeness, impartiality, transparency, deliberativeness, lawfulness, and empowerment. The framework is used to analyze a random sample of 76 watershed partnerships in California and Washington State. The study reveals the exclusionary nature of some partnerships and suggests that critical stakeholders are missing from many partnerships. However, representation was generally balanced. National and statewide advocacy groups were absent from most of these place‐based partnerships; public agencies were the primary source of nonlocal perspectives. Deliberativeness was relatively strong, indicated by the prevalence of educational and fact‐finding strategies and participants' perceptions of respectful discussion and improved social capital. Half the partnerships had implemented new policies, and two‐thirds of stakeholders believed their partnership had improved watershed conditions, indicating empowerment.

This study explores how trust arises among policy elites engaged in prolonged face-to-face negotiations. Mirroring recent evidence that citizens' procedural preferences (as opposed to policy preferences) drive trust in government, we find thatinterpersonaltrust among stakeholders in consensus-seeking partnerships is explained by the perceived legitimacy and fairness of the negotiation process more so than by the partnership's track record of producing mutually agreeable policies. Overall, hypotheses derived from social psychology do as well or better than those based on rational-choice assumptions. Important predictors of trust include small and stable groups, generalized social trust, clear decision rules, political stalemate, congruence on policy-related beliefs, and absence of devil-shift (the belief that one's opponents wield more power than one's allies). Surprisingly, null or negative correlations exist between trust and network density, measured by membership in voluntary associations. The study illustrates the value of behavioral models that integrate institutional, rational, and psychological explanations.

AbstractScholarship on collaborative governance identifies several structural and procedural factors that consistently influence governance outcomes. A promising next step for collaborative governance research is to explore how these factors interact. Focusing on two dimensions of social learning—relational and cognitive—as outcomes of collaboration, this article examines potential interacting effects of participant diversity and trust. The empirical setting entails 10 collaborative partnerships in the United States that provide advice on marine aquaculture policy. The findings indicate that diversity in beliefs among participants is positively related to relational learning, whereas diversity in participants' affiliations is negatively related to relational learning, and high trust bolsters the positive effects of belief diversity on both relational and cognitive learning. In addition, high trust dampens the negative effects of affiliation diversity on relational learning. A more nuanced understanding of diversity in collaborative governance has practical implications for the design and facilitation of diverse stakeholder groups.