Knowledge Gaps and Traps: Knowledge Politics in Collaborative Governance for Health Equality

Scholars, policy actors, and citizens increasingly call for combining not only scientific and professional knowledge in decision-making about public problems, but experiential knowledge as well. Collaborative governance is a well-known approach to facilitate such a knowledge-integration process, but little is known about how actors involved deal with the political dimensions of collaboration. In this article, we draw upon a 3,5-year action research. We show how different policy actors, citizens and researchers during a collaborative governance initiative get involved in knowledge politics. We observed how collaborative endeavors to fill knowledge gaps lead to, what we call, knowledge traps. We describe how knowledge traps can be recognized, how knowledge traps can enhance but also threaten collaborative processes, and offers suggestions to constructively deal with them in collaborative governance settings.