Concepts of maturity appear in the social sciences usually related to a state of ripeness or the fulfillment of evolutionary gaps or requirements. In the field of business administration, in particular, more specifically related to project, performance, process, quality and information management, there are many maturity models based upon semantic scales which define more or less mature stages - against which real-life situations shall be contrasted. In the field of public administration, most maturity models are related to quality and human resources management. The main assumption behind maturity models is that maturity is direct and positively correlated to performance.
The purpose of the paper is to develop and test a model of collaborative governance – allowing the measurement of collaborative maturity across different cases. The main research questions are: how to evaluate collaborative maturity? Which factors most affect collaborative maturity? How factors and consequences of collaborative maturity are correlated (like attributes and performance)?
The conceptual foundation is Emerson's et al collaborative governance regime concept (Emerson, K., Nabatchi, T., & Balogh, S. 2011. An Integrative Framework for Collaborative Governance. Journal Of Public Administration Research And Theory, 22, 1-29; and Emerson, K. & Nabatchi, T. 2015. Collaborative Governance Regimes. Georgetown University Press): “processes and structures of public policy decision making and management that engage people constructively across the boundaries of public agencies, levels of government, and/or the public, private and civic spheres in order to carry out a public purpose that could not otherwise be accomplished”.
The distinctive contribution of the paper is an operationalization of Emerson's et al model with a few adjustments, specifying its variables and attributes and proposing a measurement instrument (a questionnaire of 44 Likert scale items).
As a result, the paper applies 3 kinds of validation tests: i) content, by means of terminology, syntactic and semantic validation; ii) convergent/discriminant, through pilot test and principal components analysis; and iii) nomological validation, using multivariate statistics in search of correlations that in some extent corroborate Emerson's et al original hypothesis. The paper contributes directly to the guiding question of the panel (how to evaluate networks and their performance?), offering tools which allow both academics and practitioners to evaluate in collaborative processes.
Furthering network governance theory development: challenges/opportunities, new theoretica
