Measuring success in devolved collaboration

Abstract

In recent times, legislatures and domestic courts increasingly require the use of devolved collaboration to manage and protect community resources. As a result, in many countries, an increasing emphasis on participatory mechanisms of resource-based decision making emphasizing place-based collaborative processes has emerged. Such processes involve stakeholders from the public and private sectors who consult together in order to arrive at shared goals regarding resource use and planning. Such collaborative processes arise from a growing dissatisfaction with top-down centralized announce and defend decision making policies. Yet, devolved collaboration is not without its challenges. Ensuring that such processes do not further entrench racial and economic procedural and distributional inequalities, scholars have identified that devolved collaborative processes must not be indifferent to social, structural, institutional conditions necessary to realize its potential for equitable decisions. In response, this paper suggests structural improvements to the current process of consensus-based devolved collaboration which include the use of majority vote and the elimination of veto power, and offers a set of principle-based measures or indicators that can be used to assess whether benchmarks of equitable participation are being achieved at the local level.