Using collaborative performance summits to help both researchers and governance actors make sense of governance measures

Abstract

The challenge in measuring governance is not just to identify relevant measures, but to then also make sense of these measures. This chapter proposes that both the researchers studying governance arrangements and the actors practically engaged in such arrangements would benefit from organizing collaborative performance summits. During a summit, actors in a collaboration gather to explicate their ambitions, exchange information, examine progress, and explore future actions. This dialogue offers actors an opportunity for learning, accountability, and relationship-building, while researchers get to collect diverse governance measures and observe how actors collectively interpret these measures. The organization of a summit is a form of action research, where researchers initiating or even observing a summit are likely to affect the dynamics of the discussion and the governance arrangements. Collaborative performance summits therefore require careful preparation, but in return offer researchers and actors a rich bounty of insights.