THE EFFECT OF MULTI-STAKEHOLDER PARTICIPATION IN IMPLEMENTING COOPERATIVE GOVERNANCE APPROACH IN SRI LANKA

Abstract

Cooperative governance approach (CGA) creates a new era of the public administration development in Sri Lanka. This research analyzes the effect of multi-stakeholder participation for implementing CGA in Sri Lanka. Although many countries practice CGA in a successful manner, developing countries have some issues and challenges in implementing CGA. The case study is based on Kelani River Basin Multi-Stakeholder Partnership Approach. Primary data was collected through structured questionnaire and open-ended question based interviews, from public, government, NGO and private sector officers. The sample size was sixty. The study received its key structural guidance from the Van Meter and Van Horn model of policy implementation (1975). Stakeholder participation in cooperative governance can be described under two ways. One is the stakeholder participation of the main institutions in cooperative governance. The other way is community participation in cooperative governance. The stakeholder participation between the main institutions in cooperative governance is based on the responsibility and the transparency. To ensure the transparency the institutions use some strategies like, multi-stakeholder meetings. For that they use reports, discussions and feedback analysis. Responsibility between the institutions is based on the nature of the institutional workload. All public sector institutions participated to this project because it is their responsibility to involve in this project and they are responsible to protect Kelani river basin in many ways. Private sector participated to fulfill their social responsibility and to mitigate complains and accusations directed at them. The NGOs are responsible to provide technical assistance. Transparency between the community and the institutes is based on two factors such as sharing records with the community and feedback program of the project. The responsibility between the community and the institutions was examined based on the community satisfaction of the project. There are 36% of communities in the sample who are satisfied about this project. There are 58% of people who have no exact idea about the satisfaction, but they have been affected by some factors to be unsatisfied but not totally unsatisfied. But there are 6% of people who are totally unsatisfied about this project.