Understanding and repairing relational dynamics in localized policy-conflicts – a framework for analysis and action

Policy-conflicts are booming. The increasingly interdependent structures involved in policy-practices and the increasing complexity of policy themes such as climate change, migration, planning, and youth care provide an ideal breeding ground for disagreements, disputes, and more serious types of conflict. When these large policy themes are expressed in cases that are concrete, grounded and localized, stakeholders can find themselves stuck in conflicts that are hard to oversee or even understand, leaving them feeling uncertain about their next move (Ansell and Boin 2019). Pragmatic interventions based upon relational action science can provide valuable insights into these grounded situations, assisting stakeholders to find a way to restore their relations and find a way out of the impasse (Bartels and Wittmeyer 2019; Kuitenbrouwer, 2021). In these situations: “Analysis does not precede and guide action … but emerges interactively, pragmatically, and deliberatively with it” (Forester, Kuitenbrouwer, and Laws, 2019, p 457). By adopting a relational stance and introducing different forms of frame-reflection, the focus of these pragmatic interventions is not so much to find consensus, as to understand and repair the relational patterns between stakeholders that led to conflict in the first place and contributed to the subsequent controversy. This paper presents a framework for understanding the relational dynamics in a policy-conflict that can help to identify and orient the pragmatic interventions that can repair relational dynamics in the local context of a policy conflict. The analysis is based on empirical research in over 10 cases. Three archetypal relational dynamics of policy-conflicts are proposed in light of this analysis. Subsequently, following Emirbayers and Mische’s (1998) conceptualisation of agency as informed by the past, projected towards the future, and practically evaluative within contingencies of the present, three basic transferable outlines for interventions that can restore relations are suggested.