Collaborative Governance: A Promising Idea, Challenging to Put into Practice. Seminar at the University of Oslo

Antoni Verger presented “Collaborative Governance in Education: Concepts, Comparative Models, and the Barcelona Case” in an invited seminar at the Faculty of Education, University of Oslo. The presentation was conceived as a synthesis of the research programme as a whole, tailored to an audience unfamiliar with the project but highly experienced in educational leadership.

The seminar developed the argument in six stages. It began by explaining why collaborative governance has become increasingly necessary, before situating educational zones within the broader shift from New Public Management to New Public Governance. It then compared collaborative arrangements across seven education systems and concluded with the Zona Nord pilot as the empirical core of the presentation, including an explanation of why the team adopted a realist evaluation approach to study its implementation and effects.

When promising ideas encounter micro-political barriers

The central argument drew on two years of fieldwork. The findings point to the persistence of institutional inertia, tensions between established professional cultures, and a legitimacy challenge embedded in the design of the zone itself. These difficulties were particularly visible in the newly created role of zone leader: a position without an established place in the system, occupied by a professional without a teaching background and operating in a leadership environment still strongly shaped by traditional professional hierarchies.

Verger’s synthesis was that collaboration repeatedly comes into tension with an education system organised around individualised forms of responsibility and accountability. This is precisely why realist evaluation—combined, where appropriate, with counterfactual approaches—is especially valuable: it makes it possible to identify which mechanisms are activated, for whom, and under what conditions.