The Transparency Imperative

Early in this book, we describe the cycle that successful collaboration requires: analyze, assign, design, and assess (AADA). The chapters that followed dissected the experiences of China and the United States in using, misusing, or mistakenly not using collaborative governance across a broad spectrum of policy areas. Those accounts reveal, for both nations, many successes and more than a few failures. The successes tend to occur when collaborators devise by creative effort, or improvise by trial and error, the proper alloy of public and private responsibilities and the proper sharing of discretion. In many cases, reassuringly, initial failure is the overture to later triumph; when one set of arrangements works badly, collaborators try again.