Performing conflict A dramaturgical analysis of contentious urban climate change policy

In recent years, policy conflict has become a focal point of analysis in public administration and public policy studies. Some authors study the frames and dynamics of conflict-escalation (Wolf & Van Dooren, 2021), as well as the role of storylines and language (Verhoeven & Metze, 2022), while others develop frameworks to look at policy conflicts across cases (Weible and Heikkila, 2017). These contributions, which are a much-needed nuanced and dynamic understanding of conflict as a policy-relevant issue, mainly view conflict as the disagreement on policy issues (Weible and Heikkila, 2017) or the expression of incompatible objectives (Wolf & Van Dooren, 2018). This paper wants to go beyond that understanding and sees conflict as part of a performance in a sequence of staged events, enacted by different actors through certain scripts. Following the work of Goffman (1956), Hajer (2005) and others (Escobar, 2015; Verloo, 2015) we argue that a dramaturgical analysis can help to uncover these scripts and thus the way conflict is performed. This analysis contributes to the knowledge of how actors make meaning of policy conflicts and how language, objects, settings, and the broader context may reinforce how policy conflict is dealt with. A dramaturgical analysis of conflict furthermore may uncover the performative elements that play a role in the expression, escalation and outcomes of policy conflict. Zooming in on two case studies of contentious urban climate change policies in Belgium, we use a combination of ethnographic observations of participatory moments and critical discourse analysis of media coverage and policy documents to uncover different scripts of policy conflict. In this way, we shed light on dominant ways of how conflict is performed and enacted and who plays a role in this and who does not. We also identify the artifacts, words and staging practices that structure the micro-politics in these scripts, therefore connecting the role of text and language on policy conflict with the wider social order in which conflict is enacted. We expect to uncover a number of different scripts that actors use for performing conflict on continuous climate change policies in an urban context. Aspects of policy conflict, such as the performative styles of actors and the discourses that relate to those styles (Yuana et al., 2020), will also come into view.