Finally Throwing Those Wellies Away? Collaborating in Search of a Solution for Venice Flooding.

Collaborative governance is often advocated as a way to address 'messy' problems that individual stakeholders cannot solve alone. However, whereas stakeholders' participation brings a broad range of response options to public decision-making, the complexities of the perspectives at stake may also lead to conflicts and stalemates. This is especially true in collaborative environmental governance, where conflict is common and stakeholders' interdependence in more than one arena tends to be frequent. Based on a longitudinal field study, we explore how to break stalemates in collaborative environmental governance when they occur, and move the collaboration towards a shared decision. The successful collaborative decision-making for the defence of Venice against floods represents our empirical setting. Our findings show that, in this context, the combined effect of three factors seems to be important to break stalemates and lead stakeholders towards a shared decision in collaborative environmental governance: stakeholders' reactivation, fear of marginalization and leaders acting as orchestrators.

Achieving Sustainable Development Goals Through Collaborative Innovation: Evidence from Four European Initiatives.

The role to be played by multi-stakeholder partnerships in addressing the 'wicked problems' of sustainable development is made explicit by the seventeenth Sustainable Development Goal. But how do these partnerships really work? Based on the analysis of four sustainability-oriented innovation initiatives implemented in Belgium, Italy, Germany, and France, this study explores the roles and mechanisms that collaborating actors may enact to facilitate the pursuit of sustainable development, with a particular focus on non-profit organizations. The results suggest that collaborative innovations for sustainability contribute simultaneously to the fulfilment of different Sustainable Development Goals, reaching beyond their original intent, and that the value being created has the potential to reinforce such roles and mechanisms. These partnerships are prompted and managed by non-profit organizations that act as metagovernors of collaborative innovation processes as they play the roles of cultural spreaders, enablers, relational brokers, service provides, and influencers. These findings will help policy-makers and practitioners in the public and non-profit sector to identify and utilize emerging opportunities for value creation through collaborative innovation, and to better design existing and prospective collaborative efforts aimed at sustainable objectives, thereby supporting progress towards the implementation of Agenda 2030.