Clocks, Clouds and Collaboration: The Evolution of a Research Agenda

In this talk, Tina Nabatchi will explore how her research agenda has evolved over time. She’ll begin with a “clocks and clouds” metaphor that helps frame the kinds of ‘big’ questions that interest her. She’ll then turn to collaboration and collaborative governance, explaining how her research has shifted from studying specific processes to building frameworks and theory to empirical testing. She will illustrate this evolution with her current project, “The Atlas of Collaboration,” which is an attempt to build a large-n database on collaborative governance that contains multi-level and multi-type data that span and connect individuals, structures, processes, outputs and outcomes.