Strategies to promote collaborative governance regime in Indian rural road maintenance

Purpose: Effective maintenance of rural roads is an essential aspect of public infrastructure delivery. However, governments failed to upkeep the built infrastructure. Accordingly, this study addresses this pressing issue by identifying attributes, skills and resources for asset maintenance. To do this, collaborative governance, a recent plausible alternative in the public policy literature, is used. Design/methodology/approach: The literature review proffered 29 strategies for operationalising collaborative governance principles. A questionnaire survey with the public sector representatives comprising top-level, mid-level and lower-level engineers was used to test the applicability of these strategies in rural infrastructure maintenance of India. The rated responses concerning strategies were subjected to exploratory factor analysis to determine the underlying structure for reducing the dimensions to make them practically operational. Findings: The exploratory factor analysis showed that six dimensions play an essential role in initiating and promoting collaboration. This parsimonious framework suggests building a common collaborative framework, communicating vision and fostering communities, leadership, increasing the industry's capacity, transparency of power and responsibilities, and technical and financial resources. Thus, governments' initiatives to build collaboration is most prominent in initiating and sustaining a successful collaboration. Practical implications: The practical strategies reinforced through this study can formalise self-initiated regimes or independently convened regimes to a federally directed regime well within the scope of the national programmes. Thus, findings primarily have considerable implications to emerging countries where reducing the unit costs to save the public exchequer from wastage and preventing assets from becoming dilapidate are essential. Originality/value: Public sector practitioners often lack the essential skills and innovative thinking and thus offered new knowledge would transform the traditional practices in infrastructure maintenance. Theoretically, the present research advances the understanding of structures and processes for collaborative governance theory to non-contractual infrastructure asset management literature.