The literature on collaborative governance encompasses a rich body of case study research.  With the goal of harnessing the collective power of these case studies for theory-building and theory-testing, a group of scholars organized a collaborative governance case database to aggregate these cases and facilitate their joint analysis.  The goal is to create an open source resource for scholars working on collaborative governance.  The talk explains the basic structure of the database and provides some illustrative examples of how it has been used for theory-building and testing.  It will reflect on the challenges of generalizing from case studies and provide information about how you may contribute to and use the database.
Christopher Ansell is a professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley.  His current research focuses on the collaboration of public and private institutions to govern unruly public problems and promote social innovation.