Learning in collaborative governance: trusting or being trusted?
(2019) Association Suisse de Sciences Politiques (ASSP) & Dreiländertagung — Location: Zurich (14.February.2019)
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- Abstract
- Learning in collaborative network is crucial to cope with the complex and uncertain problems that characterize today’s world. It is through the acquisition of knowledge that actors generate new ideas and build joint-action, fostering the creation of integrative and innovative policies. Hence, collaborative network outcomes depends on the actor’s capacity to integrate and synthesize this knowledge—that is the actor ability to learn. Recent research has demonstrated the importance of relationships in learning processes. Yet, little is known about how an actor relational characteristics influence its own ability to learn. The aim of this article is to understand how trusted information exchange shapes individual acquisition of knowledge within collaborative networks. Doing so, it provides insight on how micro social processes influence learning and identify the key actors that are able to aggregate the information and formulate new ideas. More specifically, it argues that the acquisition of knowledge depends on whether the information source is perceived as trustworthy—someone competent, benevolent and honest. Based on data gathered in eight collaborative networks and logistic regressions, the results show that the impact of trustworthiness varies according to the type of learning, being important for relational and political learning but not for policy learning. Moreover, if policy actors learn from people they perceive as trustworthy, the opposite is also true: trustworthy actors more likely to learn about others’ interest and political games. Overall, this article shed the light on the key role of trustworthy actors that assimilate and diffuse new knowledge and hence, drive the collaborative process to a good end.
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Riche, C. (2019). Learning in collaborative governance: trusting or being trusted? Association Suisse de Sciences Politiques (ASSP) & Dreiländertagung, Zurich. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/60764