This paper investigates collaborative research arrangements between Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) and public and private actors, addressing societal challenges and, particularly, Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to generate Public Value (PV). To do that we follow a syncretic approach that combines PV literature and the innovation literature, with a particular focus on the quadruple helix model. This paper also provides empirical evidence with a focus on the case of the University of Bologna (Unibo, hereafter) examining Unibo’s H2020 research projects within the societal challenges pillar. Data collection includes a review of relevant literature, and a survey administered to researchers involved in these projects. The findings highlight whether and how different research partnership configurations foster innovative solutions, identifying active actors in addressing societal issues and revealing the drivers and obstacles affecting PV creation. The paper contributes to the literature on PV by providing more evidence on the connection between collaborative research arrangements and PV. Namely, it provides empirical evidence offering practical insights for public administrators to understand the university research contribution to SDGs and how its partnerships with external stakeholders impact PV. Also, from a practical point of view it defines the cluster of organizations that contribute to innovative solutions for addressing societal challenges.

To address the fragmentation and complexity brought by New Public Management and the new contexts in which the state operates - marked by complex problems and a loss of trust in institutions - movements and reforms aimed at establishing inter-organizational relationships have been implemented to improve the performance of the public sector. Collaborative Governance emerges from these dynamic strategies to produce public products and services with multiple stakeholders, aligning and integrating the various parties' ambitions.

Given the ongoing discussion on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), marked by the complexity and interdependence of actors, innovative, collaborative solutions are needed to achieve the desired goals. This necessity is further underscored by introducing a goal related to partnerships and collaboration: "Partnerships for Development" (Goal 17), demonstrating that collaboration is a crucial element for sustainable development and the implementation of the SDGs and the 2030 Agenda. Thus, this study aims to explore how Collaborative Governance supports strategies to implement the SDGs. To this end, through content analysis, we examine four initiatives involving public and private actors related to implementing the SDGs in Portugal. We aim to analyse whether these meet the criteria of Collaborative Governance, and the various dimensions anticipated for its process.

Only one initiative meets the criteria for Collaborative Governance, and Portugal still needs an established collaborative governance arrangement for implementing the SDGs. Therefore, it is necessary to invest in collaborative arrangements initiated by public organisations that allow for participation in decision-making and greater consensus-building, preserving a real contribution to public policy and a better understanding of the impacts and benefits of collaboration. It is also necessary to discuss the need for metagovernance structures for sustainable development.

Co-creation describes multistakeholder collaborations addressing societal issues through social innovation, generating public value (Brandsen, et al., 2018; Ansell & Torfing, 2021b). It challenges the idea that government actors have full knowledge about what is best for citizens (Torfing, et al., 2019). Instead, it highlights how different knowledge sources can inform collaborative problem solving (Bovaird & Loeffler, 2021; Van Dijck & Steen, 2023; Thomsen, 2017).

Since there is scarce evidence on how distributed knowledge informs the co-creation of social innovations, this research analyses the structural and collaborative governance conditions under which co-creation networks produce social innovations. We explore how knowledge is defined in co-creation literature, considering that there is little conceptualisation on how (tacit) knowledge is accessed during co-creation (Bovaird & Loeffler, 2021), and how/what actors learn in such processes (Voorberg, et al., 2017; Osborne, et al., 2016).

Our guiding question here is how is knowledge approached by co-creation literature? and what are the defining features of knowledge and expertise informing co-creation processes? We perform a problematising (or critical) literature review (Alvesson & Sandberg, 2020) aimed at reflecting on references to the role of knowledge in co-creation literature. The review focuses on 50 peer-reviewed international publications (43 articles, 7 book chapters) on co-production/co-creation addressing the issue of knowledge, expertise, learning, and experience, published over the past decade (2014-2023) in the public administration discipline.

Findings stress the distributed character of knowledge sources (Ansell & Torfing, 2021a; Vara, et al., 2021), including those where lived experience is a key source of expertise (Jaspers & Tuurnas, 2023) and that may fall beyond conventional boundaries of ‘disciplinary’ structures (Nicholas, et al., 2019).

We find that some of the tensions of co-creation and participatory processes revolve around knowledge, e.g. the prevalence of specialised technical jargon or the tensions between experiential knowledge and technical expertise may prevent “lay” actors to engage (Brandsen, 2021, pp. 530-1; Chauhan, et al., 2023).

Overall, knowledge and expertise tend to be portrayed here in terms of ‘knowledge use’, either as relevant input/resource to enhance service efficiency (Jakobsen, 2013; Thomsen, 2017), or as a condition for citizens’ ability to contribute to/benefit from co-creation (Alford, 2002; Jakobsen & Andersen, 2013).

While insightful, the idea of ‘knowledge use’ may over-instrumentalise knowledge, offering an unidirectional depiction of how it circulates (Hoppe, 2005; 2010; Andriessen, 2008). To overcome this, future research can build on boundary work shedding light on actors’ attempts to work together (Gieryn, 1983; Hoppe, 2010).

By focusing on ‘knowledge in co-creation’, our findings point out to cognitive, relational, performative, and contextual conditions. We build on these to outline a ‘nested-configurational pathways’ approach, capturing how the alignment of these conditions explains the co-creation of social innovations. Here, combinations of conditions display different configurations, while modes of alignment express alternative pathways. These pathways are nested in the sense that they are embedded in a multilevel setting. We bring insights from network governance (Provan & Kenis, 2008), collaborative governance (Ansell & Gash, 2008) and boundary work (Gieryn, 1983) as complementary theoretical streams to analytically ground these dimensions.

Furthermore, knowledge circulation occurs in networked structures of collaboration aimed at social innovation and collaborative governance. Our ongoing research in progress presents preliminary evidence on how network structures and collaborative conditions define the way that knowledge informs the co-creation of social innovations.

Governance innovation is an important topic in public administration research. Based on

the empirical evidence of governance innovation in China, this paper analyzes the pathways to the

sustainability of project-driven innovation in urban grassroots governance and reveals its complex

causal relationships. Using the selected cases, a multidimensional analysis framework is constructed, and the qualitative comparative analysis method of fuzzy sets is used. It is found that there

are three combined paths for the sustainability of innovation, namely dependent development, social embeddedness and government–society cooperation. The first two paths are the most common

for the sustainability of innovation, and they cover most of the selected cases. Case tracking also

reveals that innovation driven by project operation can stimulate the behavior of grassroots governance innovation, but it does not guarantee the sustainability of the innovation. The sustainability of

innovation requires more mobilization of the grassroots society to enhance social embeddedness.

Moreover, this study results provide inspiration for the sustainability of innovation in the later

stages of projects.