A Dialectic Perspective on Stakeholders’ relating Pathway in Katendrecht

The quality of stakeholders’ relations is critical to the success of collaborative governance projects (Koski et al., 2016; Booher, 2004; Hillier, 2000). Hence, it comes as no surprise that many studies have been concerned with identifying relational qualities necessary or desirable to engender collaborative success (e.g. Ansell & Gash, 2008; Emerson et al., 2012; Innes & Booher, 2004). However, the focus on relational values and qualities such as openness, mutual understanding, or trust pictures a static and teleological idea of ‘ideal’ collaboration. This disregards the dynamic, complex and messy character of stakeholders’ relations. Relations are processes rather than ‘containers’, they continuously ‘become’ rather than ‘are’ (Baxter, 2011). Change is ever-present and if we take change as a fundamental fact of relational reality then, as Harvey (1996) argues, it is this change process that needs to be understood. In this paper we take up this challenge and question how stakeholders’ relations evolve over time (i.e. describing the relating pathway) and why they evolve as they do (i.e. explaining the relating pathway). This paper focuses on change and dynamics in relational meaning-making – how stakeholders understand and give meaning to their relations with others. The analytical framework relies on relational dialectics theory, an approach developed within interpersonal communication theory and social psychology (Baxter & Montgomery, 1996; Baxter, 2004; Baxter, 2011). The core idea of this approach is that relational meaning making emerges from the dynamic interplay between contradictory or competing, yet interrelated values, which are conceptualized as dialectical tensions. This paper studies stakeholders’ relating pathway within the collaborative arrangement set up to approach the redevelopment of the area of Katendrecht in Rotterdam. Analysis reveals how relational meaning making revolved around the struggle between multiple competing values. In particular commonality and individuality, sharing and privacy were in continuous interplay, mostly patterned as cyclic alternation in dominance. However, during one specific episode in the redevelopment project, the competing values were no longer framed as mutually exclusive, but as both desirable for establishing what stakeholders experienced as a uniquely positive collaboration. Two interrelated elements stand out in our findings. First, when stakeholders succeeded in developing a so-called ‘hybrid meaning’ that simultaneously ‘accommodates’ competing values, they experienced collaboration as most successful, even unique. Second, while stakeholders indicated that they were also satisfied with episodes in which values such as commonality and sharing dominated, they also appreciated the alternation towards values such as identity and privacy, seeing this as necessary to achieve their interests and make progress in the governance process. At some point the increasing commonality was experienced as undesirable and unnecessarily complicated. This suggests that, different from what is often theorized in existing literature, ‘working’ relationships in collaborative governance are not per definition characterized by qualities as commonality or openness. Rather, they are relationships in which various values can co-exist and become more or less dominant over time, depending on what is needed in the governance process.