Abstract for: Exploratory Model of Collaborative Governance Regimes

The Integrative Framework for Collaborative Governance developed by Kirk Emerson, Tina Nabatchi, and Stephen Balogh (2012) provides an influential architecture for analyzing collaborative governance regimes. However, it remains largely descriptive and offers limited tools for examining the dynamics of collaboration. This study explores the design of a System Dynamics model that formalizes the relationships among its components and enables simulation of how collaborative governance regimes evolve over time. The model is constructed by inferring causal hypotheses from the relationships described in the framework and representing them formally as stocks, flows, and feedback structures. The process is iterative: hypotheses are formalized mathematically, simulated, and compared with patterns of behavior reported in the literature, progressively refining the structure of the model. The modeling process has enabled the preliminary identification and formalization of feedback structures linking the main components of collaborative governance regimes. This work contributes to understanding the dynamics of collaboration by transforming a conceptual framework into a formal model suitable for simulation and computational experimentation. Following a logic of structural generalization, the model seeks to capture the essential architecture of the regime in an analytically simple, parsimonious, and conceptually coherent form, opening new possibilities for exploring and contrasting structural hypotheses about the dynamics of collaborative governance. AI tools were used to assist with language translation of the abstract.