Understanding collaborative governance in practice: the case of the capital cities agreement for implementing Victim’s and Land Restitution Law Colombia

This research emerged out from gap between the value added to collaborative governance and the empirical evidence of such benefits in Colombian. Despite the fact that there is not monitoring indicators that clearly illustrate how collaboration improves the implementation of complex public policies, national government has been promoting this strategy, ignoring the disparities among local and regional government, thus actual outcomes of multi-level governance. In particular, the paper looks at the case of capital cities agreement for implementing Victim’s and Land Restitution law, as the more tangible case of a collaborative initiative boosted by local entities. Particularly, the research seeks to explain in what ways policy approach with respect to collaborative governance influence local government’s cooperation initiatives. Beyond the traditional input-output analysis, the paper explores into drivers, motivations and organizational dynamics among cities. The theoretical lenses used are the ones of Network governance and collaborative public management theories. The study findings suggest that the speech of collaboration has progressed faster than the institutional mechanisms for doing so. The vagueness means for acting collectively blurs how collaboration can clearly contribute to improve local governments tasks when it comes to social policies. Findings also identify and explain how exchanges took place in the case of capital cities agreement, illustrating the impact of power imbalances and motivations when conducting a collaboration.