Collaboration between local authorities and civil society organisations for improving health: a scoping review

Cross-sector collaboration has been encouraged to improve population health. Both local authorities and civil society organisations impact population health, but less is known about how the actual process of collaboration is done. This scoping review aims to explore how local authorities and civil society organisations collaborate with the ambition to improve population health.

This scoping review was informed by the guidance of the Joanna Briggs Institute, and reported in accordance with the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses Extension for Scoping Reviews.

Medline, Web of Science, CINAHL and Sociological Abstracts were searched from inception to September 2022.

We included peer-reviewed empirical studies that describe the initiation, execution or sustainment of collaboration for health between local authorities and civil society organisations.

Two independent reviewers extracted data, which was summarised and analysed using inductive content analysis.

In the 79 included articles, collaborations between local authorities and civil society organisations entailed many different aspects, from exchanging knowledge, allocating resources, providing different types of support or human resources, training, forming different working groups, agreements and working plans to gathering data for needs analysis or evaluation. Few articles described how the collaboration had been initiated or sustained. Initiation was done through advocacy, needs assessments, making a request, creating a workgroup and conducting a pilot study. Sustainment efforts were continuous meetings, documents and tools, funding, and different plans and work structures. There were often additional actors involved in the collaborations. Information about study design was often not described in a clear and comparative manner.

There is a need for more research on the details of initiating, executing and sustaining collaborations for health between local authorities and civil society organisations. Knowledge from this scoping review can be used to inform the planning of future collaborations between local authorities and civil society organisations.