How can collaborative practices be supported in an era of new public governance? Lessons from an education initiative

The changing nature of organisations in the public sector means that collaboration is an imperative for many. However, we still know little about how collaborations operate in practice. Those stewarding collaborations need this knowledge to provide effective support. In this article, we are interested in applying Salignac et al.'s Collaboration Health Assessment Tool (CHAT) framework to a live collaboration initiative to better understand the factors, chain of events, and actions that lead to 'healthy' collaboration. We conducted interviews with stakeholders from a collaboration initiative involved in the implementation of an education participation program. Findings from our qualitative analysis suggest the initial design stage to be of critical importance. Ultimately, our research provides an example of how CHAT can be used to identify dimensions of collaboration that are, or are not, working well for an initiative and how partner organisations can use systems thinking to understand how their collaboration functions to better address the issues that they face.