Chris Ansell, from the University of California, Berkeley, and co-editor of the current Special Issue of Policy & Politics introduces his article on collaboration.

Complexity theorists talk about “networks of networks.”   Engineers talk of “systems of systems.”  My article in Policy & Politics is essentially about “collaborations of collaborations.”

Large-scale efforts to address multi-faceted problems that mobilize many independent stakeholders often take the form of compound collaborations.   The collaborative Everglades Restoration Program in the U.S. includes over 80 restoration projects, each requiring collaboration.  The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a complex effort aggregating the outputs of thousands of scientists collaborating in different tasks forces and working groups. And UNAIDS, the Stop TB Partnership, and the Roll Back Malaria Partnership–the subjects of my article–are international collaborations of national collaborations to halt the spread of major global diseases.

Our stock of knowledge about collaborative governance has grown significantly in the past decade.   But we still know relatively little about the leadership and organizational challenges faced by large-scale Continue reading →