Collaborative governance of public health in low- and middle-income countries: lessons from research in public administration.

Multisectoral governance, one of many terms used to describe collaborative, cross-boundary approaches to solving complex public problems, is being applied broadly in several policy arenas, most notably in environmental and natural resource management, but increasingly in public health in multiple settings and scales around the globe. This paper explores how to transfer knowledge about collaborative governance to challenging public health settings found in low-income and moderate-income countries (LMICs). This paper presents a general background on collaborative governance, summarises some relevant empirical findings on the performance of collaborative governance and lays out some of the challenges and considerations for thinking about improving collaborative public health governance in LMICs.

Governing multisectoral action for health in low- and middle-income countries.

Kumanan Rasanathan and colleagues argue that the potential of multisectoral collaboration for improving health remains untapped in many low- and middle-income countries.

Adaptation in collaborative governance regimes.

Adaptation and the adaptive capacity of human and environmental systems have been of central concern to natural and social science scholars, many of whom characterize and promote the need for collaborative cross-boundary systems that are seen as flexible and adaptive by definition. Researchers who study collaborative governance systems in the public administration, planning and policy literature have paid less attention to adaptive capacity specifically and institutional adaptation in general. This paper bridges the two literatures and finds four common dimensions of capacity, including structural arrangements, leadership, knowledge and learning, and resources. In this paper, we focus on institutional adaptation in the context of collaborative governance regimes and try to clarify and distinguish collaborative capacity from adaptive capacity and their contributions to adaptive action. We posit further that collaborative capacities generate associated adaptive capacities thereby enabling institutional adaptation within collaborative governance regimes. We develop these distinctions and linkages between collaborative and adaptive capacities with the help of an illustrative case study in watershed management within the National Estuary Program.