Introduction

Although hierarchies and markets continue to play a crucial role in regulating society and the economy and delivering public and private services, collaborative forms of governance are proliferating, fuelled by institutional complexity and political fragmentation and driven by the recognition that no single actor has the knowledge or resources to solve complex societal problems (Kooiman, 1993; 2003). A growing number of studies analyse how collaboration provides learning-based mechanisms for solving ill-defined and hard-to-solve problems and for constructively managing differences (Gray, 1989; Roberts, 2000). Scholars have found that collaborative governance can be difficult to trigger and sustain as it rests on a number of contingent conditions (Ansell and Gash, 2008) and they have probed how collaborative forms of governance are managed and institutionalised (Koppenjan and Klijn, 2004; Torfing et al, 2012). However, a fundamental issue has largely been overlooked: the scale and scaling of collaborative forms of governance.

There are numerous studies of collaborative governance at the local, subnational, national, supranational and global scales (Marcussen and Torfing, 2007) and a growing body of literature examines how governance at different levels or scales combine in complex and tangled ways to produce elaborate systems of multi-level governance (Hooghe and Marks, 2003; Bache and Flinders, 2004). However, few studies have investigated scale itself as an important variable or explicitly dealt with the phenomenon of scaling, the dynamic processes through which collaborative forms of governance move from one scale to another. The scaling of governance networks and other forms of collaborative problem-solving is crucial because the failure to scale can become a major cause of policy failure.

In this special issue, we take up this important task of investigating the scalar dimensions of collaborative governance and explore the challenges of operating at a single scale, across scales or at multiple scales and of moving between scales. This introductory chapter sets out a general framework for thinking about the scale of governance and for conceptualising dynamic processes of scaling. These general ideas also provide a basis for examining the challenges of collaborating across scales or at multiple scales.