Using Collaborative Governance to Regulate Sober Living Facilities: Structures and Strategies for Mitigating the Influence of Powerful Actors in Multi-Sectoral Networks

Abstract

With the growing number of opioid-related deaths, many local governments are assembling collaborations with the goal of providing timely and tangible responses to the overdose epidemic. Although the purpose of such collaborations is to bring multi-sector stakeholders together to provide policy recommendations, the inclusion of organizations with divergent interests and differing levels of power can open the collaboration to capture by special interests. In this article, we use a mixed-method design to: a) investigate the network structure of a collaboration and b) identify the managerial strategies used to facilitate participation by diverse actors within a cross-sector task force convened to regulate sober living facilities.