Governance networks emerged as tools not for strengthening democracy but for making public governance more effective by securing joint ownership to new policy solutions, preventing gaps and overlaps and creating synergies and developing creative responses to wicked and unruly problems that could not be properly dealt with through the traditional forms of hierarchical government or competitive markets. Nevertheless, it has been argued that governance networks carries a potential for democratizing public governance by enhancing democratic participation of intensely affected actors in policy making, stimulating democratic deliberation, and recruiting and empowering sub-elites who can challenged the ruling elites. The initial argument amongst network researchers was that governance networks provided democratic arenas for collaborative self-governance placed at arms-length from the formal institutions if representative democracy. Governance networks were sites of counter-democracy and not easily combined with more established forms of democracy. Some researchers began to question the democratic deficits caused by this arms-length and demanded for a democratic anchorage of governance networks in representative democracy through different forms of political meta-governance. While the notion of democratic anchorage directed our attention towards the importance of linkages between elected government and governance networks for securing democratic governance, it still saw politicians as external to the networked governance arenas rather than as a tool to strengthen representative democracy and political leadership. This paper argues that governance networks can help to democratize elected government by involving elected politicians in collaborative interactions in ways that enhance their capacity to develop innovative and politically robust responses to the wicked and unruly policy problems of our time. The paper develops the theoretical argument and provides an illustrative example of how interactive governance in local networks can help to strengthen democratic political leadership in ways that restores democratic ownership.
