Maritime Spatial Planning (MSP) is a politically guided and stakeholder-driven process involving a range of actors (i.e., planners, stakeholders, scientists, and citizens). Theories of boundary objects offer a lens to understand how actors, in the context of decision and policy-making in organizations, can coordinate without consensus. This seems particularly relevant when institutions and communities are relatively young, and the body of knowledge is fragmented and fluid, such as in the case of MSP. A key question is whether, and how boundary objects can be intentionally designed and used to facilitate social and policy learning in such communities. In this research, the focus is on the use of the MSP Challenge serious games as a boundary object to facilitate learning in ‘Communities of Practice’ (CoP) around MSP. Data were collected through questionnaires of 62 MSP Challenge workshops between 2016 and 2020 with more than 1100 participants. Additionally, 33 interviews with key stakeholders were conducted. The findings show that the MSP Challenge is widely used for various goals and in various settings and that they are interpreted differently by different users. The success of the MSP Challenge relies on the boundary space in which it is implemented, taking into account discrepancies in learning due to variations in the backgrounds and attitudes of the participants towards the object, the activity, and the setting in which it is deployed.
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Urban commons is presented as a challenge of collaborative governance. This study delivers a normative perspective to analyse and evaluate processes and outcomes of the governance of urban commons. It demonstrates the development and application of the perspective in action research on Amsterdam’s Zero Waste Lab case, as a way to better understand successful and failing institutions in a concrete practice and to design interventions for improvement. Consequently, the (im)plausibility of collective action in urban communities and the participation of public actors present dilemmas for urban commons. The study specifically synthesises urban commons and collaborative governance scholarship and relates also in general to the transition towards co-creation in governing the city, e.g. in public administration or planning.
IT-based networking trends such as the rise of social media, crowd sourcing, open innovation, and cloud computing enable a profoundly different way of working and collaborating that challenges significantly traditional approaches of companies towards governance, i.e. the mechanisms a company employs to achieving business results and safeguarding information. Standard practices developed with a hierarchical model of the company in mind, are inadequate for providing sufficient correlation between governance mechanisms deployed and results achieved. Popular literature on the subject states that dealing effectively with such new technologies in a business environment requires relinquishing control and subverting to trust. This paper makes the case that deploying successfully new IT-based networking tools rather involves shifting one’s trust from a well-established and well-known governance system based on hierarchy and control towards another governance system, termed in the literature as network governance. This paper assesses when network governance is the better suited governance system. The presented theoretical model helps to understand how companies should use arising new technologies and which tasks are suited for network-driven IT-applications. Furthermore, the model enables to understand how network governance works to achieve business results and to safeguard information exchanges.
