Sharing a Vision Through Collaborative Governance
Creating Washington County’s Transportation Safety Action Plan
Matthew Jones
By, Kim Haughn
Portland State University
Executive Master of Public Administration
Cohort 2013
Advisor: Dr. Matt Jones
Table of Contents
Abstract
Introduction
Background
Literature Review
Goals and Objectives
Research Methods
Sampling
Data collection
Measurement
Modeling
Discussion
Areas for Future Research
Conclusion
Leadership Reflections
References
Abstract
Collaborate governance is an effective means of bringing together public and private partnerships in order to formulate a plan or policy intended for the greater good of society. It can involve the sharing of various viewpoints, desires and needs that address safety and livability for a community. Collaborative governance will be essential to creating the very first Transportation Safety Action Plan for Washington County. The Transportation Safety Action Plan will have an overarching goal to reduce transportation-related serious injury and fatal crashes on county roads. By way of a successful collaborative governance model specifically designed for the creation of this Plan, the public and private partners involved in its making can better develop agreed upon implementable action items for the Plan. To come up with the action items, the group will need to build a consensusthrough maintaining key elements of leadership, trust, cultural competency and autonomy. Transportation officials can lead the effort in creating the plan, but will need to rely on private and public partners to come up with action items that can assist in meeting the Plan’s goal.
Introduction
Collaborative governance is a way to create a network ofpublic and private partnerships that can collectively take on wicked challenges by brainstorming and problem solving in order to come up with an implementable consensus. While the term collaborative governance has been deeply researched by scholars worldwide, it is evident that there is no single model that has been designed to be the absolute process that will fit the mold for every challenge a public agency faces. However, collaborative governance as a meaning is very beneficial to public agencies that need to bring together multiple partners when creating plans or policies that are intended to benefit the greater good of society.
Collaborative governance will be essential in creating Washington County’s first Transportation Safety Action Plan (Plan). It will require a unique collaborative process that will entail collective problem solving and joint decision making from various stakeholders with differing interests in order for the Plan to be a success. Achieving this goal is not as simple as it sounds. In order to come up with a process unique for Washington County, it will require taking various pieces of other collaborative governance models in order to create a hybrid model that best suits the needs of the County that will ensure the Plan can be properly pulled together, implementable and designed to produce desired outcomes. The collaborative governance model will foster relationships with existing and new partners that will maintain their own individual identity while also working towards a shared vision to mutually conquer a rather large and important goal of reducing transportation-related serious injury and fatal crashes on county roads.
Transportation safety action plans are popping up across the nation at various agency levels as we continue to see serious injury and fatal crashes occur on roadways. Taking on the responsibility to reduce transportation-related crashes is a task that transportation officials cannot do on their own. They must recruit a variety of stakeholders including the general public in order to accomplish this great endeavor. Transportation safety is a team effort. This team will need to help create a culture of desiring safe roadways.
This paper will discuss the suggested collaborative governance model uniquely designed for the creation of a Transportation Safety Action Plan for Washington County. This model will hopefully become a resource for other local county agencies or municipalities as well in order to help establish a foundational framework for pulling together a stakeholder advisory committee that will help ultimately achieve the Plan’s overall goal.
Background
A Transportation Safety Action Plan (Plan) is a plan created for a governing agency that reviews serious injury and fatal crash data within the area of that agency’s jurisdiction. It includes action items that are ideas developedwith intentions to reduce these statistics on our road system, primarily the most common trending crash types.Clackamas County and Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) both have existing transportation safety action plans and several other local jurisdictions have plans of the same sort in the making (Clackamas County, 2012; ODOT, 2011).
ODOT has had a Plan since 1995, which gets regularly updated. They are currently commencing their fourth full rendition of their Plan. Clackamas County recently completed their first Plan in 2012.They were the first county agency in the state of Oregon to complete and formerly adopt a Transportation Safety Action Plan (Clackamas County, 2012).
To create a Plan like this, the lead agency needs to pull together a variety of stakeholders in order to address multiple perspectives relating to transportation. Transportation officials cannot conquer this plan on their own.It will require a unique collaborative governance model that incorporates best practices for facilitation in order to keep on the path to successfully coming up with action items for the Plan.
Literature Review
My research began with discussions among other agency staff and consultants that have created a Transportation Safety Action Plan (Plan) or a plan similar in type. As mentioned already, Clackamas County and Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) both have created and adopted plans (Clackamas County, 2012, ODOT, 2011). To name a few others, Clark County, the City of Bend, west Vancouver, Arizona Department of Transportation, and Ohio Department of Transportation also have similar plans that are either in the works or nearing completion. Their plans were created by consultants local to the Portland area that have an interest in creating Washington County’s Transportation Safety Action Plan.
In my own quest to produce a Plan for the County, I’ve had opportunities to discuss the making of these plans with various consultants: Kittelson and Associates, Cambridge Systematics, Inc., DKS Associates, and HDR, Inc. These consultants, who are somewhat familiar withtransportation safety action plans, have their own various ideas on collaborative governance modeling including what they have found to be successful. The information I’ve gathered from them has been very resourceful but includes a few gaps that need to be addressed for Washington County based on the stakeholders that we need to include in the creation of our Plan. Many of their models seem to lack the involvement of critical stakeholders.There were also instances where the Plans were very data analysis heavy and informative, but lacked in ways that actions can be taken by various partners in order to address the crash data trends.
Fortunately, there is a great amount of literature available that discusses collaborative governance and how it is imperative these days when governing agencies need to problem solve issues that affect the communities they serve. Interesting enough, most everything I’ve come across during my research discloses right off that bat that there is not an ideal collaborative governance model that provides the one-size-fits-all process needed to handle a challenge that agency partners are collectively working on. “In its overuse, theterm ‘collaboration’ has become a catchall to signify just about any type of inter-organizationalor inter-personal relationship, making it difficult for those seeking to collaborate to put intopractice or evaluate with certainty” (Gajda, 2004).
Not only is our County agency up against a wicked challenge of successfully collaborating when creating a Transportation Safety Action Plan but we also face the challenge of creating a unique collaborative governance model that will help jumpstart the creation of the Plan and ensure it’s success and sustainability. From the start, we must realize that “collaboration is a journey not a destination” (Gajda, 2004). We can’t assume that we’ll be able to develop all of the answers needed to address the Plan’s goal, but we can make a valid effort along the way. There is a need for flexibility and fluidity, thus requiring pulling together a hybrid model specifically for creating the County’s Plan.
In reading An Integrative Framework for Collaborative Governance, the authors pull together an integrative framework that is intended to work across a wide variety of systems (Emerson, 2011). “The framework provides a broad conceptual map for situating and exploring components of cross-boundary governance systems that range from policy or programbasedintergovernmental cooperation to place-based regional collaboration withnongovernmental stakeholders to public-private partnerships” (Emerson, 2011). This framework was helpful when applying it to the collaborative governance model needed for creating the County’s Transportation Safety Action Plan.
The authors created what they refer to as a Collaborative Governance Regime (CGR) (Emerson, 2011). This is where “cross-boundary collaboration represents the predominate mode forconduct, decision-making, and activity” (Emerson, 2011).
Emerson’s CGR framework includes three components of collaborative dynamics:
- principled engagement
- shared motivation
- capacity for joint action
Principled engagement refers to the face-to-face interactions, meetings, and other venues where partners can discuss the content and goals. This is where the various partners share their contextual views, values, and understanding of the overall goal (Emerson, 2011). While it isn’t essential to collaborative governance if consensus building is aligned from the start, in some situations this engagement may find itself extensive in handling conflict over more controversial situations.
Shared motivation refers to four elements: mutual trust, understanding, internal legitimacy, and commitment (Emerson, 2011). Partners must work together, be dependable, willing to exchange knowledge, share similar values, understand constraints, have credibility in the field of discussion and need to be dedicated to the project while overcoming possible conflicts that may occur.
Capacity for joint action is the ability to generate a desired outcome collaboratively as a group instead of individually (Emerson 2011). Its elements include identifying procedural and institutional arrangements in order to determine ground rules for the group and sustainability long-term, which is dependent on the project. The author also states that leadership is an element of capacity for joint action (Emerson, 2011). A leader plays a critical role in facilitating, conflict resolution, translating and championing the plan to ensure it comes to fruition (Emerson, 2011). Knowledge and resources are also key elements to capacity for joint action (Emerson, 2011).
Over time, the three primary components then produce collaborative action by way of a regime (Emerson, 2011). The Collaborative Governance Regime (CGR) is a high-level framework that enables the ability to develop the shared vision into a desired outcome. This is a good concept, but in the case of the creation of the County’s Plan, it lacks the ability to dive deeper into each component of the CGR to determine the vast array of variables that an agency may encounter depending on their situation. The CGR can set the stage for an agency to perform cross-boundary collaboration. But the framework for something like the Transportation Safety Action Plan will need additional components to address the dynamics of the Plan in order for it to be implemented by various agencies. There is also a level of autonomy needed that can enhance accountability.
There simply is no one easy solution to reducing transportation-related serious injuries and fatalities, but Emerson’s tools through the integrative framework process can help a group reach the shared vision when approaching the Plan’s overarching goal.
A good facilitator will also come up with a plan for the Plan. This may seem redundant, but the group needs a foundational facilitation plan in order to ensure progress and success in reaching the goals of creating the action items for the Plan. Buchel and Moss (2007) suggest that the facilitation plan include planning, guiding, post follow-up and implementation. Planning will involve creating a frame for the situation and conflict engagement, which will challenge existing models with newly developed shared models (Buchel, 2007).
When guiding a group of stakeholders, the authors suggest that the leader or facilitator take on the role of handling conflict in order for the group to come up withagreeable solutions (Buchel 2007). Choreographing private and public partners that have their own individual interests will not be simple by any means when it comes to creating a Transportation Safety Action Plan. But in order to make any headway withdeveloping action items, a good leader or facilitator needs to have a clear understanding of how to manage keeping the agenda moving forward.
Follow-up and implementation review is the final step the authors recommend for facilitating an event (Buchel, 2007). This is a safeguard that the group is on the right path to making change through the suggested action items that they agreed upon. Dropping the ball on implementation is not uncommon when the action items lack any accountability. This brings us back around to the important need to come up with realistic action items that encourage positive change.
In the journal article Utilizing Collaboration Theory to Evaluate Strategic Alliances (2004), the author Rebecca Gajda emphasizes the realization that multiple entities working together to problem solve will create a greater outcome then if an agency took on the problem on their own. But there is still a lack of clarity on how to successfully collaborate regardless of the wicked challenge. “Although collaboration has the capacity to empower and connect fragmented systems for the purposes of addressing multifaceted socialconcerns, its definition is somewhat elusive, inconsistent, and theoretical” (Gajda, 2004).
When developing strategic alliances, Gajda (2004) observes multiple key principles for which collaboration is derived.
Principle 1: Collaboration is an Imperative - It is not unusual for various agencies to find themselves dependent on each other in handling a complex issue (p. 67).
Principle 2: Collaboration is Known by Many Names – It’s meaning can vary from working together, joint venture to cooperating with one another (p. 68).
Principle 3: Collaboration is a Journey Not a Destination – “’Collaboration’ is identified as the most highly developed level of integration point on the continuum” (p. 69). This continuum includes cooperation, coordination, and collaboration.
Principle 4:With Collaboration, the Personal is as Important as the Procedural -Existing relationships and newly created relationships will be necessary when building an alliance (p. 69). It is the quality of those relationships that will have great impacts when collaborating.
Principle 5: Collaboration Develops in Stages– “Form, storm, norm perform, and adjourn” (Tuckman, 1977). These stages entail forming the alliance (private and public partners), role clarity as it relates to the initiative, determine norms (drawing focus away from implementation) and then transformation where the group assesses the findings and comes up with action items.
In order to evaluate the collaborative process, Gajda (2004) has come up with a Strategic Alliance Formative Assessment Rubric (SAFAR). The SAFAR is performed in four steps when doing the assessment.
Step 1—Convene Alliance Leadership for Focus Group Interview
Participants in this stage have reported that the interview has helped them to define collaboration, recognize that their part in the initiative is much more than “just showing up for meetings,” and understand the expectations of the other partners (p. 72).
Step 2—Assess Baseline and Projected Levels of Integration
Participants in this step are asked to come to consensus on current and projected levels of integration. The evaluator asks alliance representatives to assess their current level of integration and to speculate on their desired level of integration. They are prompted to brainstorm both intra - and inter organizationally (p. 73).
Step 3—Collaboration Baseline Data Report
The Collaboration Baseline Data Report should identify the current level
of integration between each organizational unit that is part of the initiative and should offer a baseline composite mean for the level of integration across the entire collaborative (average of all intra- and inter-project linkages) (p. 74).
Step 4—Assess Growth in Collaboration
In the follow-up collaboration workshop, post-baseline data for the initiative can be identified and recorded, which allows project managers and agency leaders to ascertain and celebrate the growth in their collaborative efforts over time (p. 75).
The collaboration theory that Gajda (2004) has described includes invaluable information about the importance of collaboration when agencies are faced with complex issues. These are characteristics of collaboration that will assist in the success of creating a strategic alliance while also outlining a way to evaluate the collaboration with the SAFAR assessment tool (Gajda, 2004). There is still a level of ambiguity in proper collaboration for the unique or specific situation, but this provides a great outline to help achieve the goal of consensus building through collaborative governance.
My research also included reviewing facilitation methods that can be incorporated into a hybrid collaborative governance model. Facilitation is an important part of collaborative governance that can help pave the way to a shared vision. The article Using Facilitation to Drive Change – The Change Leader’s Guide, the authors want readers to recognize the influence a facilitator has on driving change (Buchel, 2007). Change for many can be difficult to overcome and cope with. Facilitators can assist in consensus building and motivating a group to make change, but it is up to the authority as to whether the changes can be implemented. This will be a challenge when creating action items in the County’s Transportation Safety Action Plan. There may be ideal opportunities that are posed but it is the realistic ideas that are more likely to come to fruition with the support of the entire group. A Plan with only ideal action items will just become another Plan on a shelf collecting dust because it is too complex or costly to implement.