Enhancing policy design and sustainable community outcomes through collaborative platforms based on a dynamic performance management and governance approach

Abstract

This chapter aims at illustrating how a Dynamic Performance Management and Governance approach may support the implementation of “collaborative platforms” (Ansell and Gash, 2018) to enhance network policy design and the pursuit of sustainable community outcomes. This is an emerging field of research, embracing performance management, collaborative governance, and systems theory, aimed at fostering a learning-oriented perspective in performance data use. Such a view has been also referred as “collaborative performance management”, i.e., the “sharing of resources and information among different actors for the purposes of achieving a formal performance goal” (Choi and Moynihan, 2019, p. 1539). Since collaborative processes are main drivers of sustainable outcomes (Thomson et al., 2008), this requires that performance management extends the investigated system boundaries and time horizon. By adopting a performance governance1 view, Douglas and Ansell (2021, p. 951), described collaborative performance management as a “collection of routines used by actors working together on a societal issue to explicate their goals, exchange performance information, examine progress, and explore performance improvement actions”. The described field of study identifies the focus of this chapter, which is on applying collaborative performance management to a governance setting through a learning-oriented feedback approach. 2.