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Governance entails the formulation and implementation of public policies across organizational and sectoral boundaries through coalitions, contracts, and networks. Studies of governance tend to cluster loosely into two theoretic traditions: rational choice and sociological institutionalism. Where the former analyzes actors' individual interests and information, the latter examines their joint relationships and norms. These different analytic foci can be difficult to reconcile, leaving scholars at a loss as to how to cumulate insights and knowledge across the theoretic traditions. To understand better how the two traditions conflict and support one another in the analysis of governance, this article distinguishes domains of governance and identifies the different theories that the traditions use to study each domain. A case study of a rail transit project compares the insights from these theories, and assesses the quality and the complementarities of the explanations they offer. An analysis of the case generates propositions about the comparative utility of different concepts and theoretic traditions for understanding key governance phenomena.

AbstractThis article provides a detailed exploration of the collaborative architecture concept and its ability to deepen research on interorganizational collaborative arrangements. After introducing four components of collaborative architecture (goals, arenas, membership, and mechanisms), the article uses the components to compare two cases of public education reform collaborations. We investigate methodological challenges in coding and data analysis and evaluate the conceptual strengths and weaknesses of collaborative architecture, including the extent to which it lends specificity to existing frameworks for studying collaboration and collaborative governance. The article demonstrates that the collaborative architecture concept enables researchers to probe and assess important characteristics and relationships among goals, boundaries, structures, and processes of interorganizational collaboration as well as the exercise and embeddedness of partner influence.

Abstract
Collaborative governance initiatives often seek innovative solutions to longstanding policy dilemmas, as well as agreements on those solutions among longtime political adversaries. Producing both innovations and agreements in combination is difficult: the diversity among collaborators that enable innovations can complicate their attempts to reach agreements, while unifying factors that support agreements may diminish the prospects for innovation. This article introduces three phases of collaborative agreement and pinpoints drivers of agreements on collaborative innovations. We analyze how each driver connects to the cross-pressure between unity and diversity in collaborative governance and generate propositions that relate each driver to the production of different phases of agreements. Our propositions indicate that collaborators seeking agreements on innovations must strike a balance between factors that support innovations (but may hinder agreements) and factors that support agreements (but may hinder innovations). We recommend ways practitioners can foster and sustain that balance by varying rules governing collaborative participation, information discovery, deliberation, and decisions. We conclude by proposing new research using our conceptual refinements to study whether specific conditions surrounding collaboration are associated with the achievement of different phases of agreement on collaborative innovations.

This article proposes ways to assess the public value that cross‐sector collaborations produce. It introduces a framework featuring three dimensions of public value – democratic accountability, procedural legitimacy, and substantive outcomes – that reflect distinct priorities and concerns for public administration. Utilizing examples from research on a multi‐year cross‐sector collaboration in the transportation field, we illustrate the framework's application and identify techniques and challenges for assessing the collaborative creation of public value. The article concludes with questions and propositions to guide future research.