Reaching out and fitting in: On the challenges government officials face to engage external stakeholders

Seeking more collaborative engagement with external stakeholders is an increasing and emerging phenomenon for governments to address today’s societal challenges. Governing beyond classical rule-making, and ideally towards more consensus-seeking decision-making, requires public officials to take up different roles and responsibilities in leading or participating with stakeholders. Unsurprisingly, this creates unfamiliar or exemplified challenges for public officials to engage with stakeholders. While it is clear that positions taken by public officials denote a key pivot point to understanding collaborative engagement with external stakeholders, the current literature offers few insights into the multidimensionality and contextual nuances behind roles taken by governmental officials. To shed light on the challenges faced by officials and capacities required for effectively facilitating collaborative processes, this study serves two core aims. First, it aims to establish an integrative analytical model to explain the roles government officials take and challenges they face in steering and managing collaborative stakeholder engagement, accounting for institutional and behavioral aspects. Second, to test the analytical leverage of this framework, we draw on a novel large-N survey dataset developed by the authors, comprising national-level survey data from Dutch civil servants on the challenges they face while engaging with external stakeholders. Our preliminary results confirm the leverage of our framework and shed light on important challenges to bridge external stakeholder input with internal political-administrative decision-making.