This article contributes to the consolidation and synthesis of scholarship on collaborative governance by expanding our knowledge of how the term is used in the academic literature and policy documents in a range of European countries. It adds value to the existing reviews of the field by conducting a systematic literature review on a corpus of over 700 article abstracts and a traditional literature review identifying five key analytical dimensions. The article also provides an exploratory analysis of grey literature hitherto outside the purview of researchers and considers the linguistic and cultural connotations that alter the meaning of the term when translated into new contexts in ten EU/EFTA countries. Findings indicate heterogeneity and fuzziness in the way the concept is used. The article argues that explicit positions with respect to five main analytical dimensions and taking into account the national connotations that the term carries across political systems would inject more clarity into the academic discourse. This, in turn, will help policymakers to make informed use of the concept, especially in multi-national policy-making arenas.

This report constitutes the first deliverable of the project TROPICO (Transforming into Open, Innovative and Collaborative Governments), a project that between June 2017 and May 2021 comparatively examines how public administrations are transformed to enhance collaboration in policy design and service delivery, and advance the participation of public, private and societal actors. TROPICO investigates collaborative governance across five different European administrative traditions represented by ten European Union member states: Nordic (Norway, Denmark), Central and Eastern European (Estonia, Hungary), Continental (Netherlands, Germany), Napoleonic (France, Spain) and mixed (Belgium). This report is produced within Work Package (WP) 2, which is focused on the institutional conditions shaping collaboration in and by governments within the context of reform trajectories. It runs in parallel with WP3, which researches the transformations of individual drivers and barriers of collaboration. It precedes later work packages that will carry out empirical research on policy design and public service delivery within the context of internal and external collaboration (WP4 – WP7), and work packages that will look into the effects of collaboration on legitimacy, accountability and government efficiency (WP8 – WP9). This report reviews both scholarly and grey literature, spanning several disciplines and consisting of several inter-related strands, on collaborative governance. Based on a quantitative text analysis of over 700 publications, it provides a systematic review of how the concept is interpreted in the academic literature, as well as a qualitative review drawing on a wide range of sources. We find that the term ‘collaborative governance’ is used to describe practices that differ in terms of five key dimensions: Participation (inside and/or outside government); agency (who drives these processes); inclusiveness (organizational and/or citizen participation); scope (time frame and stage of policy cycle); and normative assumptions (positive or neutral). Furthermore, the report derives from the literature a list of institutional factors that may facilitate or obstruct collaboration with some tentative propositions about the causal mechanisms behind these variables. Finally, the report confirms a gap in the scholarly and practitioner literature with respect to the nature and analysis of relevant rules and legal frameworks that structure collaborative practices (‘codes of collaboration’).

In this paper we explore the impact of the economic recession of 2008 on gender inequality in the labor force in Central and Eastern European countries. We argue that job and occupational segregation protected women’s employment more than men’s in the CEE region as well, but unlike in more developed capitalist economies, women’s level of labor force participation declined and their rates of poverty increased during the crisis years. We also explore gender differences in opinions on the impact of the recession on people’s job satisfaction. For our analysis we use published data from EUROSTAT and our own calculations from EU SILC and ESS 2010.

The FLOWS project analyses the causes and effects of women’s labour market integration, which is an issue that represents a major challenge for the European Union and its member states, and is supposedly also a precondition for the sustainability of the European social model. The overall aim is to analyse (1) how local welfare systems support women’s labour market participation, as well as (2) the extent to which (and under which conditions) female labour market integration has contributed to the strengthening social cohesion. The project focuses on how public and private welfare services such as care and lifelong learning intended to support women’s labour market integration have been designed; on how women of different classes, qualifications, ethnicities, and geographical locations have grasped and made use of such policies, and on how the increase in women’s labour market integration has affected structures of inequality and social cohesion.

Working conditions and gender in an enlarged Europe presents a comparative study of working conditions for women in 10 central eastern European countries. The countries include eight of the 10 new Member States of the European Union, and two of the candidate countries, Bulgaria and Romania. National research teams provided a wealth of material analysing key dimensions of the labour market and work situation for women during a period of economic transition. This report’s purpose is threefold: to bring together the findings of the national reports; to explore in greater detail the Foundation data in terms of comparison between its 2001 survey of the acceding and candidate countries and 2000 survey of the EU15; and to use the national reports to evaluate the Foundation findings. 

Having a conversation with someone or even more within a group of people is complex. We are never taught at school how to do it, which implies we consider having a conversation as something simple and straightforward. Instead, we just learn from observing others. Some people are great conversationalists – it comes naturally to them – while others struggle. Some people may not fully understand how the process works, how turn-taking happens, don’t understand visual cues such as body language and facial expressions, and fail to comprehend that some topics may be appropriate or inappropriate. This can be the case for both neurotypical and neurodivergent people. The Conversation skills Assessment Tool has been developed in this first instance to help in assessing and examining conversation skills in an intervention with young autistic adults on a virtual platform (a virtual world). This paper will present the evolution of the new measure through the exploratory phase, the development phase and finally a detailed account of the inter-rater reliability process.

Although infants can frequently observe others gathering information, it is an open question whether and how they make sense of such activities since the mental causes and intended effects of these are hidden and underdetermined by the available evidence. We tested the hypothesis that infants possess a naive theory that leads them to grasp the purpose of information-gathering actions when they serve as sub-goals of higher-order instrumental goals. We presented 14-month-old infants with actions that were inefficient with respect to the agent’s instrumental goal but could or could not be justified as information-seeking behavior via this theory. We expected longer looks in the condition where the detour could not be justified and the results were in line with our predictions. While this evidence is compatible with our hypothesis, further studies are in progress to rule out alternative interpretations of our findings.

In social groups, some individuals have more influence than others, for example, because they are learned from or because they coordinate collective actions. Identifying these influential individuals is crucial to learn about one’s social environment. Here, we tested whether infants represent asymmetric social influence among individuals from observing the imitation of movements in the absence of any observable coercion or order. We defined social influence in terms of Granger causality; that is, if A influences B, then past behaviors of A contain information that predicts the behaviors and mental states of B above and beyond the information contained in the past behaviors and mental states of B alone. Infants (12-, 15-, and 18-month-olds) were familiarized with agents (imitators) influenced by the actions of another one (target). During the test, the infants observed either an imitator who was no longer influenced by the target (incongruent test) or the target who was not influenced by an imitator (neutral test). The participants looked significantly longer at the incongruent test than at the neutral test. This result shows that infants represent and generalize individuals’ potential to influence others’ actions and that they are sensitive to the asymmetric nature of social influence; upon learning that A influences B, they expect that the influence of A over B will remain stronger than the influence of B over A in a novel context. Because of the pervasiveness of social influence in many social interactions and relationships, its representation during infancy is fundamental to understand and predict others’ behaviors.