Policy Change Through Productive Conflicts: A Comparative Analysis of Collaborative Environmental Governance Processes

Collaborative governance has emerged as an important approach for addressing complex environmental challenges, enabling diverse stakeholders to co-create policies and solve pressing problems (Batory & Svensson, 2019). Despite the potential of collaboration, policy conflict remains an inevitable feature of these processes that can destabilize or catalyze policy change (Ambrose et al., 2024; Verhoeven et al., 2022; Vihma & Toikka, 2021). While conflict is often viewed as a barrier, recent scholarship highlights its potential to drive innovation and foster learning (Nohrstedt, 2022; Trein & Vagionaki, 2024; Wolf & Van Dooren, 2021). However, little is known about the conditions under which policy conflicts unfold their productive potential to foster change and improve collaborative governance processes. To address this gap, this paper identifies potential conditions for productive policy change through conflicts and examines their impact with a Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) of 15 global case studies on collaborative governance processes around water, climate change, and conservation policy from the open-access Collaborative Governance Case Database. As such, the analysis traces selected collaborative processes with productive and destructive points of policy conflict and comparatively assesses their antecedents. The analysis explores actor-centered influences such as leadership, emotions, and cooperation networks as well as institutional criteria like design and the role of knowledge sharing. This contributes a cross-contextual perspective on how social and structural conditions and their interplay enable policy conflict to drive constructive change in collaborative environmental policy processes. The results moreover provide actionable insights for practitioners to recognize the productive potential of conflict and design participatory processes that harness it as a driver of innovation.