Collaborative Governance: A New Approach to Public Value Management

Governance leads to the movement of public administration from ruling which means top down regulation approach toward a maximum collaboration of people and institutions in the civil society in order to obtain the government's goals in a self-regulated process. Governance concept moved rapidly from good governance to network governance and now towards collaborative governance. Collaborative governance defined as the union among all the stakeholders in the society in order to make the best possible decisions for the good of all stakeholders. The focus point of these interconnections must be creating the "public value", according to the differences between the values of private sector and public sector. This task would be the most challenging one in the process of collaboration of the two sectors, because at the end of the process, public values like responsibility and transparency must be delivered in the public service to citizens. Doing so, one of the most important features of collaborative governance corporations would be to increase the ability to find and solve the public problems, which is obviously one of the most challenging topics of today's public administration and solving it will help to realize the philosophy of citizen serving in public administration. The goal of this paper is to understand the concept, dimensions, challenges and necessities of collaborative governance as a new topic in public administration. We hope this paper will make a clear view for conceptualization and implementation of collaborative governance in public sector in Iran.