Conference Publication Details
Mandatory Fields
Maura Adshead
Politics and Policy Annual Conference
Been there, done that, lost the shirt off our back: collaborative governance and crisis in Ireland’
2014
September
Unpublished
1
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Optional Fields
Over the last couple of decades ‘collaborative governance’ has been hailed as means of securing better cooperation and coordination between government and stakeholders in policy. It is suggested that ‘if we govern collaboratively, we may avoid the high costs of adversarial policy making, expand democratic participation, and even restore rationality to public management’ (Ansell and Gash, 2007: 561). For some time, this appeared to be the case in Ireland where the national system of social partnership was feted as being ‘distinguished by a unique set of institutional innovations for creative, dynamic, and self-reflexive governance for social and economic development’ (House and McGrath, 2004). Yet more recent Irish experience presents an ugly rebuff to this argument. Although the system of national social partnership was widely credited with helping Ireland move out of financial crisis in the late 1980s, and contributing to the so-called ‘Celtic Tiger’; it was also criticized for helping move Ireland into the devastating financial crisis that finally undid the system of social partnership in 2008/9. This paper builds on earlier empirical work with those responsible for negotiating social partnership agreements over two decades in Ireland. It applies Ansell and Gash’s (2007) model of collaborative governance to the Irish case and uses fresh interviews with key policy actors to explore their understanding of why the Irish system of ‘government by partnership’ proved unworkable in the long run and, more importantly, what this might tell us about the sustainability of collaborative governance more generally
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