Prostitution policy beyond trafficking: collaborative governance in prostitution

Chapter Six argues for collaborative governance as an effective response to the domain-specific challenges of prostitution policy, as well as to the inadequacy of the traditional policy responses of adversarial interest group policy and managerialist policy implementation. Collaborative governance is a mode of governance in which public agencies engage with various stakeholders to jointly deliberate about public problems in a carefully designed arrangement. This, however, requires the presence of sex worker advocacy organizations to establish a productive working relationship with government partners. The chapter explores the literature on sex worker organisations and concludes that their preferred organizational form of independent collectivism does not need to be an obstacle to long-term working relationships with others. The chapter then discusses several successful cases in Vancouver, The Netherlands and New Zealand in which sex worker organizations established long-term relationships of trust with government partners, successfully managed complex contracts, and exerted moral leadership in the domain of prostitution. In all these instances, prostitution policy was more effective and humane.