This contribution analyses the EU’s new data acts. Interoperability is a common denominator of the EU’s new data acts. This paper demonstrates that the new data acts provide various approaches or concepts of collaborative governance to regulate interoperability. Although the EU’s new data acts are far from a uniform governance concept, we detected certain institutional arrangements organising the collaboration between private self-regulatory bodies, other private stakeholders and public bodies to lay down rules for interoperability.

Food loss and waste throughout the food supply chain is a growing issue with significant economic, social and environmental implications. Wasted food represents lost profits for the food industry, increased food insecurity in communities and the unnecessary production of greenhouse gas emissions, among many other detrimental consequences. Due to the large number of stakeholders involved in the food supply chain and the complexity of their relationships, there is increasing interest in addressing food waste issues through collaborative governance approaches, such as food policy councils (FPCs). Assessing how FPCs engage diverse stakeholders and organizations in food waste reduction efforts can provide important lessons for improving local food systems governance more broadly and contribute to the creation of more sustainable food systems. To do this, we leverage the theoretical concept of ‘collaborative advantage’ to analyze how FPCs foster collaboration, both internally and with external partners, to achieve policy and programmatic goals that individual stakeholders could not achieve alone. Drawing on plan documents and semi-structured interviews with members of five FPCs across the USA, we find that FPCs can foster collaborative advantage by establishing comprehensive food system plans, systematically measuring progress toward objectives, and transparently communicating the evidence of their progress to the communities they serve.

To address complex social problems, such as long-term unemployment, local authorities in many countries are developing “holistic” or “integrated” services, where multiple actors and professions collaborate with a view to better meet the needs of the individual citizen. By breaking with existing practices and regulations, collaborative services must be legitimized in new ways so as to appear acceptable not only in the eyes of the public and politicians, but also to caseworkers and the long-term unemployed persons. This article examines the multifarious and sometimes neglected efforts to make these collaborative services legitimate in the eyes of this plurality of stakeholders on multiple levels of governance. Our study indicates three distinct but mutually interrelated spheres of audience that require partly conflicting justification work. We also find that the narrow pursuit of justification work to ensure legitimacy with one audience may potentially jeopardize the justification work in the other two.

Protecting marine biodiversity and ensuring sustainable use through a seascape approach is becoming increasingly widespread in response to the ecological, social and institutional challenges of scaling ocean management. A seascape approach means clustering spatial management measures (marine protected areas) based around the principles of ecological connectivity, and developing or enhancing collaborative governance networks of relevant stakeholders (managers, community groups, non-governmental organizations) based around the principles of social connectivity. As with other large-scale approaches to marine management, there is minimal evidence of long-term impact in seascapes. This study uses a theory-based, participatory impact evaluation to assess perceived changes attributed to the Atlántida seascape in Honduras (initiated in 2015), encompassing three well-established marine protected areas and the non-legally managed waters between them. Using an adapted most significant change method, 15 interviews with a representative subset of seascape stakeholders yielded 165 stories of change, the majority (88%) of which were positive. Enhanced social capital, associated with cross-sectoral collaboration, inter-site conflict resolution and shared learning, was the most consistently expressed thematic change (32% of stories). Although most stories were expressed as activity- or output-related changes, a small proportion (18%) were causally linked to broader outcomes or impact around increased fish and flagship species abundance as well as interconnected well-being benefits for people. Although minimal (and occasionally attributed to prior initiatives that were enhanced by the seascape approach), this impact evidence tentatively links seascapes to recent related research around the effectiveness of appropriately scaled, ecosystem-based and collaboratively governed marine management that balances strict protection with sustainable use.

‘Communities’ – whether local, regional, or transnational – can provide an essential force in the protection of our global underwater cultural heritage (UCH). As an issue of low political concern, with its protection vulnerable to externalities and compliance weaknesses, UCH forms an ideal test case for exploring governance solutions without reliance on the state. It is also an area where communities are increasingly integrated within governance models. This article examines the theoretical justification for reducing reliance on top-down laws to protect natural and cultural heritage, exploring Ostromian arguments for greater community self- and co-regulation. Using this theoretical framework, it highlights numerous advantages of community-oriented governance in the management of a complex global concern, such as UCH protection, and underscores the role and importance of the appropriate design of meta-regulation in steering communities towards wider public objectives. The article also identifies where communities or ‘networks’ have provided important additional protection for UCH, and discusses further policy mechanisms – such as community buy-in, incentivization, and self-regulation – which could help to facilitate community-led governance in the future.

Collaboration has become a key element of governments’ efforts to address complex policy problems as well as of attempts to revitalise democracy. Depending on what public agencies want to achieve by engaging in collaboration – whether collaboration is intended to gain support for public policymaking, induce voluntary actions by stakeholders, or something else – collaborative governance will have to mean very different things. Collaborative governance needs to be made fit for purpose. Drawing on the literature and a case study of road safety governance in Sweden, the article theorises on the interplay between strategic purpose and institutional design in collaborative governance and shows how two types of strategic purposes – policy support and voluntary actions – determine appropriate choices of institutional designs. This generates important insights that contribute to understanding institutional diversity and factors important to the success or failure of collaborative governance, and can aid practitioners who are designing collaborative forums within various policy fields.

As collaborative governance processes continue to grow in popularity, practitioners and policy scholars alike can benefit from the development of methods to better analyse and evaluate them. This article develops one such method by demonstrating how collaborative governance theory can be integrated with the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) to better explain coalition dynamics, policy-oriented learning and policy change in collaborative contexts. I offer three theoretical propositions that suggest alternate relationships among ACF variables under collaborative governance arrangements and illustrate these propositions using interview data from an original case study of a collaborative governance process in Colorado, USA. The integration of collaborative governance theory with the ACF improves its application in collaborative contexts and provides new theoretical insights into the study and practice of collaborative governance.