Triggers, Traps, and Disconnect: How Governance Obstacles Hinder Progress on Grand Challenges
通过澳大利亚大堡礁地区水健康组织的案例，研究多利益相关者治理中的协调与合作障碍如何形成自我强化的治理陷阱，削弱应对重大挑战的能力。
In this paper, we adopt a multistakeholder governance perspective to study how people collectively respond to a grand challenge. Specifically, we show how working through governance obstacles—that is, coordinating and collaborating challenges arising from a multistakeholder governance approach to responding to grand challenges—can erode actors’ ability to mitigate these wicked problems. We illustrate this process through an in-depth case study of WaterHealthOrg, a multistakeholder initiative established to address degrading water health in Australia’s critical Great Barrier Reef region. Our findings reveal how, in an effort to avoid group paralysis or dissolution, actors employ specific practices to address governance obstacles. By doing so, actors set off a cumulative self-reinforcing process, driving them to consolidate rather than critically reflect on and adapt their collective response. Drawing on these insights, we develop a conceptual process model of how efforts to manage multistakeholder governance obstacles can generate governance traps that shape participants’ ability to collectively respond and, ultimately, mitigate grand challenges.