Most of the challenges facing regions today cannot be addressed by one organization or even one sector alone. ARS?s newest monograph, Regional Stewardship and Collaborative Governance, identifies implementation strategies that work for these complicated, multi-sector challenges .

Written by Doug Henton and John Melville of Collaborative Economics and ARS CEO John Parr, and sponsored by the Morgan Family Foundation, this monograph describes what regional collaborative governance looks like and how it departs from traditional approaches to public policy problem-solving.  Under regional collaborative governance, the role of government changes from command and control to contribute and collaborate; the focus of leadership shifts from the jurisdiction to the region; and the framework for collaboration expands to include new purposes, participants, and processes with new roles for the public, private and civic sectors.

The authors offer examples such as Envision Utah , Chicago Metropolis 2020, Oregon Solutions, The St. Louis Metropolitan Forum, Birmingham Regional Growth Alliance, and Capital Region?s Emergency Management Coordination Plan as case studies of new approaches to regional issues.  These examples fall into three kinds of multi-sector models, or regional collaboratives that have emerged as new vehicles for action: multi-sector compacts, multi-sector forums or networks, and multi-sector organizations.  Different models work in different places based on the regional context and the nature of the challenges each faces.  What all three have in common is that they provide a practical, voluntary, and non-partisan public space to work on governance problems and solutions.

?As a field,? conclude the authors, ?the practice of regional collaborative governance is running ahead of theory.?  Even though regional collaborative governance can be difficult to implement, ?practitioners are recognizing that they have little choice but to embrace it, as the alternatives of top-down government, grassroots initiative, or issue-by-issue advocacy are not working.?  Many such efforts have focused on the front-end of the processinitiation or agenda-setting.  Some have taken the next step of mobilizing and engaging the public to develop goals and strategies to take the region to the future it wants to get to.  But building implementation early on into the design of regional efforts may be the most importation step. 

To that end, the monograph offers a regional collaborative governance roadmap that any team of regional stewards can follow in their quest for better problem solving and implementation.  By engaging in this practical process, the authors hold out hope that regional stewards will reinvent how our nation solves its problems, and reweave the fabric of American society region-by-region.

To download a PDF of the ARS monograph Regional Stewardship and Collaborative Governance, visit RegionLink by clicking here.  Regional stewards interested in using this monograph and its accompanying practice guide in John W. Gardner Academies should contact Doug Henton,  National Coordinator, Gardner Academy at