Testing the Zone Approach Against Nine Countries: COSPPO 2026

The team closed this stretch of engagements on 24 April, when Edgar Quilabert and Delfina Campetella presented “Collaborative Governance from Within: The Territorialization of School Governance Policies in Comparative Perspective” at the 3rd Early Career Workshop on Comparative Social and Public Policy (COSPPO), organized by IGOP-UAB with ERC support. Where the team’s other outputs mostly narrate or compare descriptively, at this stage it consisted of a systematic, design-oriented comparison of nine arrangements worldwide, built around a new analytical framework.

Two properties, four types

The paper’s focus is New Public Governance’s least-studied dimension: collaboration within the state itself. To capture this, the framework places each arrangement along two properties: institutionalization, which captures how formally an arrangement is embedded in the state apparatus — its legal status, the breadth of actors’ participation, and whether it has dedicated leadership, and density, which captures how much authority the arrangement actually exercises — the breadth of its scope, the intensity of its involvement, and the consequentiality of its decisions. Crossing these two properties yields four ideal types: Consolidated, Latent. Organic and Fragmented arrangements.The typology was built via Fuzzy-Set Ideal Type Analysis across 45 policy documents and nine cases, including Catalonia’s own zones.

Where Catalonia lands

Chile, Quebec, Portugal, and England fall in the Consolidated quadrant; France sits in between; Manchester and New Zealand tie between types. Flanders and Catalonia land in the Fragmented quadrant, showing the sample’s two largest “governance gaps” — where institutional scaffolding outpaces governing substance. The framework compares design, not outcomes, but it cautions against equating the existence of a collaborative structure with a real redistribution of authority.