ABSTRACT
Rural areas have been characterized as being cooperative and collaborative as they face the fortunes of nature and external markets. While this characterization may not be totally appropriate, the idea of friends and neighbors coming together to help raise a barn is firmly etched in the history of rural America. This history is representative of an ambitious experiment in collaborative governance called the National Rural Development Partnership (NRDP). It was conceived before the word 'collaboration'1 became so well used. It predates the popular concepts of 'Reinventing Government' or 'New Governance', or 'social capital'. It addresses a major policy arena that is heavily fragmented - namely rural development (Radin etal 1996).
