The frontiers of networked governance

Governance networks combine the voluntary energy and legitimacy of the civil society sector with the financial muscle and interest of businesses and the enforcement and rule-making power and coordination and capacity-building skills of states and international organizations (Reinicke & Deng, 2000). [...] Opening-up is necessary to take account of the complexity of sustainable development challenges, but the very act of opening-up makes the task of problem solving more complicated: what were once externalities became complex interdependencies and trade-offs that are now explicitly considered and negotiated, and the interests of actors from different realms of society need to be addressed within the [...] Governance networks do not merely aggregate resources, but are structured to take advantage of the fact that each participating sector brings different resources to the fore; they combines the voluntary energy and legitimacy of the civil-society sector with the financial muscle and interest of businesses and the enforcement and rule-making power and coordination and capacity–building skills of sta [...] These approaches allow centralized governance authorities to maintain control over opening-up and closing-down of the process of strategy formation—centralized authorities retain a high level of intermediate modularity—but aims to stimulate the influence of outside actors that may self-organize within the boundaries of the governance network. [...] The level social capital within a given governance network, and the success of collaborative visioning in instilling shared visions and strategic alignment towards common goals and collective outcomes, determines the amount of self-steering that may be possible and desirable within networked governance, and the possibility for the multi-actor network to create shared value.