Can the power of platforms be harnessed for governance?
| Published date | 01 March 2020 |
| Author | Christopher Ansell,Satoshi Miura |
| Date | 01 March 2020 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12636 |
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Can the power of platforms be harnessed for
governance?
Christopher Ansell
1
|Satoshi Miura
2
1
Department of Political Science, University
of California Berkeley, Berkeley,
California, USA
2
Graduate School of Law, Nagoya University,
Nagoya, Aichi, Japan
Correspondence
Christopher Ansell, Department of Political
Science, 210 Barrows Hall, University of
California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94705, USA.
Email: cansell@berkeley.edu
Funding information
Miura received financial support for this
project from JSPS KAKENHI (Grant Numbers
JP15KK0082 and JP15K03315).
Abstract
Although not as eye-catching as their business counter-
parts, many public and private institutions are currently
experimenting with using platforms as a strategy of gover-
nance. Governance platforms are now being constructed by
a wide array of actors at different geographical scales and
across a wide range of issue areas. Although often enabled
by digital technology, governance platforms fundamentally
embody a new organizing logic to achieve distributed par-
ticipation and mobilization. While private platforms are
transforming the way that companies create and market
their products or services and shifting the fundamental logic
of how value is produced and appropriated, can this power-
ful organizing logic be harnessed for public as well as private
purposes? We investigate how governance platforms gen-
erate powerful effects and survey the extant literature on
governance platforms. We conclude that governance plat-
forms do demonstrate promise, although they face a num-
ber of challenges.
1|INTRODUCTION
As suggested by phrases like ‘platform economy’,‘platform society’or ‘platform capitalism’, the idea that platforms
represent a novel and transformative mode of innovation and production is now widely accepted in the business
world.
1
Although not as eye-catching as their business counterparts, public institutions are also experimenting with
platforms as a strategy of governance. Examples include self-styled platforms such as the United Nations' Global
Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction, the European Union's Platform for Action on Diet, Physical Activity and Health,
or Canada's Climate Change Adaptation Platform. Less overtly, institutions as diverse as the United Nations Global
1
On these ideas, see Kenney and Zysman (2016), Van Dijck et al. (2018), and Srnicek (2017) and Langley and Leyshon (2017), respectively.
Received: 13 July 2018Revised: 2 September 2019Accepted: 30 October 2019
DOI: 10.1111/padm.12636
Public Administration. 2020;98:261–276.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/padm© 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd261
Compact, Scaling-Up Nutrition, the Network of European Foundations, and Amsterdam Smart Cityare also exploring
platform strategies. Governance platforms are now being constructed by a wide array of actors at local, national,
regional, and global scales and across issue areas like humanitarian aid, nutrition, environmental sustainability, eco-
nomic development, and poverty alleviation.
This interest may partially trade on the hype around private sector platforms, but also builds on and extends
three widely recognized developments in the public administration and governance literature. First, governance is
increasingly recognized as decentred or distributed, as an extensive literature on networks, contracting, public–
private partnerships, co-production, and collaborative governance has established. Some of this work already
anticipates the platform concept. Provan and Kenis (2008), for example, describe the importance of a central or lead
organization for coordinating a network of service providers or stakeholders. The platform concept takes this idea
one step further because platforms typically serve as the organizing nexus for multiple networks rather than for a
single network.
Second, as governance becomes more decentred and distributed, leadership becomes more indirect, facilitative
and intermediating. This argument has been developed in discussions of the state's role as a ‘metagovernor’or ‘meta-
regulator’(Sørensen and Torfing 2009; Gilad 2010) and in the literatures on ‘facilitative leadership’in collaborative
governance (Ansell and Gash 2012), ‘orchestration’in international relations (Abbott et al. 2015) and ‘intermediation’
in innovation studies (Howells 2006). The platform concept builds on these ideas, but goes a step further to focus on
how platforms leverage institutional and technological resources to enable decentred and distributed action.
Third, there is growing appreciation that the public sector needs to actively manage planned and emergent
change (Kuipers et al. 2014) and public sector innovation has become a prominent topic (Torfing 2019). Work on
adaptive governance, democratic experimentalism and crisis management all stress the importance of continuous
adaptation and improvement (Sabel and Zeitlin 2008; Moynihan 2009; Steelman 2016). Platforms provide a frame-
work for strategically enabling decentred and distributed innovation and change.
The platform concept brings these three developments together to examine how strategic leadership and insti-
tutional and technological resources enable multiple distributed activities to innovate, adapt and change. The central
question addressed in this article is: Can this potentially powerful organizing logic be harnessed for public purposes?
Since governance platforms are still largely experimental, we cannot fully settle this question at present. However,
we can begin to address the issue to help scholars and practitioners explore the potential of platforms. We start with
a general statement about what governance platforms might offer to the public sector, before probing the concept
more deeply. We then investigate the institutional mechanisms that purportedly make platforms powerful and pro-
pose a typology of governance platforms. Finally, we investigate the challenges and successes they have
encountered.
2|WHY ARE GOVERNANCE PLATFORMS POTENTIALLY IMPORTANT?
We identify four broad ways—connecting, scaling, intermediating and mobilizing—that platforms might contribute to
public administration and governance, with references to relevant research. First, by constructing interactive arenas
for connecting various actors, platforms may allow the public sector to reach and engage citizens and stakeholders in
powerful new ways. Crowdsourcing platforms may help to aggregate distributed citizen input (Bott and Young 2012;
Brabham 2013; Aitamurto and Chen 2017; Liu 2017; Taeihagh 2017). Participation or deliberation platforms may
foster citizen participation in policy deliberation (Desouza and Bhagwatwar 2014; Aitamurto and Landemore 2016;
Aragón et al. 2017; Garard et al. 2018; Sørensen and Torfing 2018; De Blasio and Selva 2019). Co-production plat-
forms may enable public authorities to engage citizens in improving the delivery of government services (Linders
2012; Falco and Kleinhans 2018a; Janowski et al. 2018) and multi-stakeholder platforms may allow diverse groups
to engage in productive exchange (Steins and Edwards 1999; Selsky and Parker 2010; Adekunle and Fatunbi 2012).
262 ANSELL AND MIURA
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